Pop star can’t resist pop quiz. Everybody knows Lady Gaga’s been flirting with Slavoj Zizek, but, hang on—as per Vanity Fair‘s kiss and tell column—Ke$ha is dating “radical” professor Fredric Jameson. This is an academic tycoon who knows how to $pend his time. The way he lives now sent First back to a passage where Robert Hullot-Kentor paused to wonder at Jameson’s knack for finding the green back not just of all things libidinal but of all things conceptual as well. Hullot-Kentor quoted—then queried—Jameson’s invocation of the investment values of “Adorno’s stock:”
“As for the current ratings of Adorno’s stock.”…Adorno’s stock? Its ratings? While these words beat about the ears, read also a few pages later that Adorno wants concepts “cashed at face value”. Cashed? Adorno wants cash for concepts?
A cash cow like Ke$ha may know the deal, but First ain’t trying to hear that. We’ll hang together with Hullot-Kentor. Thanks to him for allowing us to reprint this slightly compacted version of his protest against Jameson’s Late Marxism. You can read Hullot-Kentor’s entire piece (along with page citations from Jameson’s text and footnotes) in Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (Columbia University Press, 2006).
Frederic Jameson is one of the great tattooed men of our times. Every inch of flesh is covered: that web of cat’s cradles coiling up the right calf are Greimas and Levi-Strauss; dripping over the right shoulder, under the sign of the Cimabue Christ—the inverted crucifixion—hangs Derrida. And hardly recognizable in those many other overlapping splotches of color is just about everybody else: Lyotard, Sartre, Habermas, et al. “All One, All Different” scrolls across the panoramic chest. In Late Marxism Jameson scouts carefully before setting portentious digit on a densely engraved quadrate of his left hip, Adorno! and falls into a roll: “Adorno you will notice is like Althusser, only more like Sartre, except the idea of totality, in my opinion, as I’ll say again later, differs from Rorty, coming back to Luhman, maybe like Marxism, late, very late, minus Hegel’s concept of time, perhaps, maybe, almost. . . . Take another look, another look, justnot too close, please, ladies and gentleman, give the man room to breathe!”
This is mocking no doubt, but what is this: Adorno’s aesthetics “can speak a variety of speculative languages, none of which ever finally freezes over . . . like Lukács’s, Bloom’s, Macherey’s, Bakhtin’s, or Derrida’s”? He forgot Sartre. No worry, skip a line: “The history of aesthetic situations is here as omnipresent and inescapable as in Sartre.” But where did de Man go? Skip again: “to use Paul de Man’s suggestive phrase.” Open to any page and the same miscellaneous cornucopia comes tumbling out, each name a distraction from what could conceivably have been the issue at hand: “After Freud (indeed, after Marx), after Nietzsche, after Foucault on madness, after a whole enormous enlargement in our sympathy with what people do (this word, however, meant in Rousseau’s sense as Verstehen).” If neither the indeed, after Marx, or the whole enormous arm flailing adequately sharpens things up, Jameson’s clarification of sympathy as the idea of Verstehen in Rousseau—great German hermeneuticist—makes every thought sparkle.
Hit and Run
Jameson is so preoccupied storing up this bounty and spilling it back out again that paragraph by paragraph continually swerves out of its own way to be able to throw in another garbled reference and skid half on purpose into the next wrong topic. The excited author does not mind; he is playing bumper cars. But if you read carefully, and still register concussions, it is a bad experience. Consider, a passage on Adorno’s style that takes up the question of Karl Kraus’s influence on him, but concludes making the point—Watch Out!—that Benjamin is more important to Kraus: “What Adorno found here (in Kraus), I want to suggest, is the very paradigm of an expressive syntax, in which the actual machinery of sentence structure is itself pressed into service, in all its endless variety, and mobilized to convey meaning far beyond its immediate content as mere communication and denotation. To Kraus, far more than to Adorno himself, might well apply Benjamin’s idea that speech communicates itself, and perhaps also his idiosyncratic notion of language as ‘non-representational mimesis’”[1]. Every gesture of this style subserves a need for remoteness, a need that evidently defines what thinking amounts to for this author. The only way then to get even for reading something like this and for the damage it has done to several generations of graduate students is to study it close up, line by line, for what it hides. First of all, then, note in the sentence just quoted that Jameson is barely interested in what Adorno found of importance in Kraus. Jameson after all is a literature professor and besides being a first-rate list maker he could not possibly believe that Kraus—rather than, say, Hoelderlin or Stefan George—was for Adorno the preeminent writer to use syntax expressively. All expressive language is in any case syntactically expressive. And whatever there is between Kraus and Adorno, the interchangeable elementsof a mechanical order—that “machinery of sentence structure”—would least of all comprehend what is shared in their nuanced language. Jameson is exploiting what no one would doubt—that Adorno and Kraus are somehow inwardly related—but without in any way developing the content of this relation. Examine them closely, minutely: the bulk of the two phrases works at taking up the slack uncoiled by the contentlessness of their claim: The very paradigm, the actual machinery, the endless variety, the far beyond, the far more, the Adorno himself exalts the arbitrary by raising it to the absolute along the lines of a ‘truly great vacation.’ Rhetorical largess—from the “I want to suggest” to the “might well apply” to the “perhaps also”—is to supply the pomp of judicious reflection for thinking that never got a second thought.
Under even close scrutiny notice that in those places Jameson is not at all concerned with how Benjamin’s ideas of speech communicating itself and “non-representational mimesis” resonate in Kraus’s work, the point that should justify Jameson’s skewed divigation. He has nothing to say about what either of these hardly self-evident quotations mean or how they characterize Kraus. Suspicion that conceptually not much stands back of Jameson’s associations—other than the desire to fold in some lines that once caught his attention in order to keep the cant moving and all things far away—is prompted especially by the second quotation’s reference to “non-representational mimesis.” Benjamin never used the phrase, though he did introduce the idea of “unsinnliche Ahnlichkeiten.” If “nonsensual similarities” is what Jameson meant—and noting as an aside that he subsumes it to the currently all purpose “representation,” which is not at all what Benjamin’s concept is about—the nonsense clue is obvious: Benjamin’s idea is said to be “idiosyncratic.” Now check back to that sentence. Jameson says that this idiosyncratic idea refers back to Kraus. But in what sense is one person’s idiosyncrasy that which he shares compellingly with someone else? In the sense of not sharing it…
On the Way Down
The puzzle being examined here is that this book is widely read while making so little sense, and destructively so. Wherever the eye falls and takes seriously what it finds the molecules of print start kissing each other goodbye. It gets teary on all sides. Self-aware, the eye must decide to skirt the semiotic pulp. But then how is it possible to document the puzzle of Late Marxism if even its devoted readership is unlikely to allow itself to reflect on one sentence or another? For now, it will have to be on a dare: here is the elastic cable attached to the railing, this is the Golden Gate Bridge, below is Late Marxism. The topic is suddenly Adorno and structuralism and though the print is already swimming in all directions, Jameson is certain of one thing: “It is certain that Adorno is a traditional, that is to say a prestructuralist, philosopher.” Adorno is a prestructuralist. Done. But just lines later the level of assurance named certainty is uncannily surpassed by confidence: “It can be asserted with some confidence that he never goes as far as the poststructuralists.” Hard! A prestructuralist does not go as far as a poststructuralist. Why not? Because he has “some notion of thinking. . . beyond a material embodiment in language.” Some is now followed by almost: “What needs to be added here is that the ‘concept’ functions in Adorno as a constricting and reifying system almost as iron-clad as language itself for poststructuralism.” With certainty Adorno is a prestructuralist who is confidently not, somewhat not, almost a poststructuralist. Probably. But a problem remains: Adorno did not think that the concept per se is an ultimate block to reality. If he had his writings would be chalked up to the irrationalism against which his dialectical research took shape…
Always and Again
Where Jameson does come through lucidly, the question of how well he has understood Adorno continually recurs. Note, for instance, his comments on a passage quoted from Adorno’s Positivism Dispute concerning the concept of totality. First, the passage from Adorno: “It is almost tautological to say that one cannot point to the concept of totality in the same manner as one can point to the facts, from which totality distances itself as a concept.” Now reattach that elastic cable and prepare to dive: according to Jameson, Adorno in this passage wants to demonstrate in the denial of the possibility of pointing factually to the concept of totality the following self-contradiction: “The misconception seems to be based on the idea that if you talk about something repeatedly, you must like it; to point something out insistently turns into the advocacy of the thing, very much on the principle of the messengers who bring bad news (and suffer the consequences).” The tip-off to the mistakenness of Jameson’s interpretation is that—like a pop tune knotting a tail of homilies onto “Mama Said”—it tags together a string of platitudes from talk about it/like it to bad news messengers pay the consequences. But the implicit self-contradiction that Jameson discerns could not be what Adorno is talking about because, as Jameson explains it, it is not a tautology, whereas Adorno emphasizes just this quality of the assertion. And Adorno’s point is not so hard to understand: he is responding to positivists who reject the concept of totality on the grounds that it cannot be factually observed. Adorno finds a way to agree with their objection so as to undermine the criticism: To say that totality cannot be factually observed does not challenge the concept but only repeats tautologically an aspect of its definition, which is that totality is not a fact but an organization of the facts.
While the eye balks at studying the detail of Late Marxism, Jameson insists that this is the optimally requisite level of focus. “This book offers detailed readings” of Adorno’s main writings. This level of attention is coherent with what he picks out as the specific importance of Adorno’s work:
The originality, indeed, of his philosophical work . . . lies in his unique emphasis on the presence of late capitalism as a totality within the very forms of our concepts or of the works of art themselves. No other Marxist theoretician has ever staged this relationship between the universal and the particular, the system and the detail, with this kind of single-minded yet wide-ranging attention.
Jameson is correct that Adorno interpreted the particular as a microcosm of the whole. But this is not to be confused with a vision of infinity stored since creation in a grain of sand. Here the particular is a result. The intention of dialectics is to know this particular from within and in doing so to fulfill the Hegelian obligation that philosophy grasp time in concepts. But where Hegel’s dialectic is both progressive and in principle at every point reconciled with itself, Adorno conceived a dialectic at a standstill that would potentiate in reflection the antagonistic content of history. By pursuing the mediation of the particular through the social totality, negative dialectics transforms the power of totality into the force of historical reflection by releasing the history stored in the particular as the power that vitiates it. For Adorno, therefore, dialectics is, on the one hand (as he wrote), the wrong state of things and, on the other, dialectical research is the capacity to give shape in the particular to this state of things. To the extent that Adorno succeeds in this his writings are neither a metaphor, a method, a perspective, nor a system.
Though Jameson discerns the central idea of this form of interpretation, and although there are traces of many of the related concepts, the thought never becomes internal to the book. If it had, Jameson’s intention to present a detailed reading of Adorno in light of what he promotes as Adorno’s importance—his micrological research—would have given Late Marxism a dialectical turn. It did not: the reflection in which the totality is discovered in the particular never occurs. Instead of dialectical research the book is a labor of common sense: Jameson compares and contrasts, as if interpretation would result from adding and subtracting; he points weightily to paradoxes and complexity, which he confuses with dialectics; he supplants insight with the self-evidence of moral and political posturing; he names and effuses. Hardly dialectical, Jameson’s stance toward these writings is what Hegel disparaged as “healthy human understanding” (gesunder Menschenverstand): Adorno is the topic, and—what could be more obvious?—Jameson writes about this topic. The act of abstraction—the division of the universal from the particular—that sees subject and object at opposite extremes is presumed.
This commonsensicalness lies back of much of the chaos and popularity of Late Marxism. Like Terry Eagleton—with whom he has much in common—Jameson is a conventional thinker whose will to occupy a front seat on the flying wedge of literary criticism, combined with an omnivorous intellectual metabolism, led him into genuinely anticonventional work, which he regularly scrambles. This does not bother his readership: anxious to share his velocity and academic promotion, they take the incoherence as the mark of authenticity embossed on ideas that they are content to let hover overhead, reserving their attention for tracking the pulse of idées reçues right under the surface.
The Deeper Message
Because Jameson’s thought remains external to the content of his book, this content—the philosophical summaries and moral-political posturing—stands in the way of recognizing what takes place in Late Marxism. It is by giving attention to its impoverished detail—the non-intentional level of the book—rather than gullibly, and fruitlessly, responding at the level of argumentation and political identity, that the book can be asked to show its hand.
Consider then Jameson’s we, the voice in which he writes. The book not only reads like, but is, an advertisement—in this case—for Adorno. When Jameson writes that Adorno “may turn out to be just what we need today,” there is reason to suspect that this claim to political authenticity is the opportunistic, importuning “I” of mass culture solidarity. This is confirmed by the manipulativeness of what turns out to be the book’s genuinely incomparable message: “The deeper message of my book . . . has to do with celebration of the dialectic as such.” Contrary to Adorno, for whom dialectics is the wrong state of things and negative dialectics its presentation, Jameson adopts the ad world’s mantle of upbeat rationalization and invites everyone to come tie on a balloon to the idea of the antagonistic totality.
But, his message is more significant than that; it is incomparable, literally. Scanning the page and pages of this claim, it turns out that—though the claim could be tagged onto various thoughts—the deeper message forms no specific comparative. It is that of the newer, better, faster type that, by being newer, better, faster than nothing ascertainable, preempts the act of discernment that might find it older, slower, worse, or more shallow. The seeming objectivity of the subjectively posited standard—surpassed by whatever is being promoted—is a measure of the degree to which the individual is willingly overwhelmed by the promotion. What is more than pivots on this subjectively coerced index so that what is more than is already part of you, your better, faster, newer, and—specifically in Late Marxism—your deeper part. Thus the technique of Jameson’s call to the ghastly celebration of the perpetually antagonistic world enjoins as does any advertisement: by insinuating itself. Jameson’s deeper message is that members are signed up prior to joining.
Those Crazy Texts
After introducing what he claims is Adorno’s most important philosophical contribution—the interpretation of the universal in the particular—Jameson writes: “As for the current ratings of Adorno’s stock. . .” We must stop here, in this strangely echoing hollow, to consider a bit and catch our bearings. Adorno’s stock? Its ratings? While these words beat about the ears, read also a few pages later that Adorno wants concepts “cashed at face value.” Cashed? Adorno wants cash for concepts? This is the language of the tribu, for sure. Here, at the book’s trailhead, the scent is laid down for the sniffing graduate pack to follow in special disregard for any of those big ideas that are said to be as strange as they are just because common sense is in the lead. We are entering the domain of text and textuality. Here the philosophical ear must adapt to phrases such as “or, if you prefer a different kind of terminology” and “truth, however that word is used.” Notice, for example—in a discussion of Adorno’s concept of mimesis and whether philosophy can achieve a mimetic response—how Jameson conceives the relation of the “reader’s mind” to a biceps palpating invocation of the powers of undomesticated language: “Whether philosophy can actually do that, whether the most powerful or formally ingenious or evocative philosophical sentence structure can intervene with (mimetic) effects of this kind in the reader’s mind, is open to some doubt.” Mimesis is the affinity of subject and object as it is felt in one’s knees on seeing someone else stumble on theirs. Yet the disembodied quality of Jameson’s expression—“the reader’s mind”—shows no familiarity at all with mimesis. Instead, he presupposes the mind as a box at the far end of the nervous system, separate as well from language. When he claims that the idea of a mimetically compelling language is “open to some doubt,” he asserts, with level common sense, the diremption of subject and object that the thought of such a mimetically compelling language is beyond consideration. The presupposition is that words could never carry the distance from fingertip to cerebrum and back again. Even when he argues the contrary, this is not what he says: “A brilliant essay in literary criticism might well open up possibilities of reading, or rereading, some hitherto opaque, dull, or exasperatingly perverse text . . . and even disengaging the formation of some new aesthetic or poetic within your mind.” Because the power of these perverse and exasperating texts is just the ability to make it all the way into “your mind”—back behind where reading usually takes place—they hover at a fixed distance from it.
While Jameson gestures easily on all sides to strange, perverse, and ingenious texts—capable certainly of anything—his veneration serves plain dismissiveness. These texts will never rock the boat. They can be as crazy as they want just because, fully divided from manipulative mind, they are themselves meaningless counters in a cash economy of thought. Together with the textual fluidity implied by the many references to “rewriting” and “rereading,” Jameson’s wild texts are gathered up around something much homelier than his easy familiarity with the textual far side wants to suggest: the philosophy of language of that garden-variety skeptical empiricism that is the sensus communis of most of what passes for linguistic radicalism in America…
“Theory”
“Adorno certainly does have a ‘style,’ (like the rest of the ‘modern masters’…).”
These quotation marks—and those in which Jameson sets off word after word (“freedom”)—express a reluctant agreement to make do with language. Words are accepted on the basis of a peremptory gesture that means to isolate them from the guilty associations that cling to them—to “style” and “modern masters”—and that threatens to drag them out beyond the breakers of good sense and the writer’s own purity. The neutralized word becomes terminological, a reified technical device—set between the self and the world—over which the self claims to dispose. Bracketed in scare quotes, words acquire a quality of obviousness, as if to say, we all know what “style,” “modern masters,” and “freedom” are about and just what must be excluded for these words to be usable. But separated from their inherent attributions they are meaningless, and the bien entendu is without content other than a self-assertion that demands nodding along. The bracketed words are technical yet suggestively self-promoting language. As such, language is a façade behind which an isolated self finds a fulcrum—that pivot requisite of all theory, according to Jameson—for manipulation. This dynamic is not limited to the words Jameson sets in quotations marks. It is the idea of theory throughout his work and the one that makes him an ideal thinker for MLA theoreticians: the tattooed body of total theory is a character mask that, though it cannot speculate philosophically, is adequate for speculation of all other kinds.
Suggested Reading
Whatever else it is, Late Marxism is professorial: Each page opens to a jowly: “So it is . . .” “To be sure . . .” and “It is surely . . .” Showing his radical credentials, he does not hesitate to reach for maxims that ring somberly from the lecture hall: “It is, indeed, not people who change but rather situations.” This maxim is a clue to the nature of the professorial throughout the book and to the book as a whole. What does Jameson’s apothegm mean? That people stay the same while the world changes? No, because as he draws on its wisdom he continues:“This can also account for the alterations of my own views.” How could the claim to the unchangingness of people explain Jameson’s change? It cannot. Though his comment does make plain what he was trying to say with his maxim, which is that it is not people who change situations but the reverse. And while it is important to notice that he did not trouble to get his thought as far as logical coherence, it is more important to notice that he did not need to. His concern was the production of the semblance of a maxim in a book that is a Potemkin village of thought. Its illusoriness is the standard of the linguistic architecture: the in my opinion and the perhaps that pepper line after line, the I want to suggest, and, most frequently, the seems, which on word count alone would need be recognized as the substance of the book, larding as it does whole pages with variants on it seems clear and it would seem to suggest and mass culture seems to demand. Throughout, rudiments of academic judiciousness—that controlled suspension of conclusion—become one of the forces of the Jamesonian as if. Its appeal is not hard to locate: Since the contemporary relativism to which this as if thinking speaks is less a matter of philosophy than an indifference shaped by a panicky fear of knowing and the need to protect a self that insists on believing that it can somehow keep pulling the strings, all resignation of knowledge in the name of illusion can expect to be met with applause and relief.
The illusion Jameson means to provide is of a particular sort. Just as nineteenth-century photographers regularly used gommage—working over the negative with an eraser—to instill the false aura of spirit around a face or across a landscape, Jameson has a dozen techniques for smearing a damp cloth across the page—beginning with the exploitation of the Adorno-Kraus relation to the incomparable comparative, to all that seems to be, and so on—and his aim is a related aura: Late Marxism manufactures the familiar. This is the halo effect produced by every name Jameson lists. Whenever he falls into a roll of Lyotard, Gramsci, Sappho, and Schelling or intersperses a sentence with “(Heidegger!)” and ends another with “so far Kant!” he transforms thought into rungs for academic arboreals arcing their way to success making lists of their own. The subordination of thought to the functional order of self-promotion—the abstracting power of the social totality—assures that the gutted, self-evident, and interchangeable results cannot help but shine. Above each of these names—and now among them Adorno—it reads: “Your choice!” The mass culture betrayal is the same as always: what appears as the familiar in Late Marxism is at every point the fully estranged.
Note
1 Emphasis has been added in quotations throughout this discussion.
From June, 2011