The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory [1 ed.] 9780822378679

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THE JAMESONIAN UNCONSCIOUS The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory Clint Burnham Duke University Press

Durham and London

1995

THE

~JAMESONIAN

UNCONSCIOUS

POST-CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS

Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson

© 1995 Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper oc Designed by Cherie H. Wesunoreland and typeset in Plantin Light with Gill Sans display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

FOR DANIEL JONES. 1959-1994.

in remembrance and love

CONTENTS

'.'

Acknowledgments Preface

xi

Abbreviations I

ix

xxi

MARXISM TODAY

I

virtual marxism ...why marxism (today)? ... pragmatic objections ... technologies of marxism ... reading marxism reading... returning to normal. ..liberalism and marxism ... the two dints 2 POSTMODERN MARXISM

3I

apostrophe's' ... reading marxism (ii) ... dissing for tenure ... /for example I, for example ... examples, ii... stretching language ... digressing as example ... seriality and inftation ... footnote as commodity... ontinkel: the figure as illusion ... casual relations ... barbarically long quotations ... non-place ... form and content... utopia and emotion... style and the man... the fetish of the category... elevated language ... in defense of sartre as hero... against clarity... no subject 3 THE JAMESON IAN UNCONSCIOUS

76

always red ... molar/molecular antagonisms ... and yet, ... a materialist theory of power...a briefforay into novels ... the power of materialism ... marxism and orientalism...truth, error, contradictions ... dialogic marxism... a return to althusser ...

viii

contents

•

overdetermination explained, once and for all ... shrunken dwarfs, expanded ... desire ... three interpretive levels ... acting out your aggression .. .lukilcs: or, marxism and masochism ... sex and money... dead soldiers ... morganatic marriages ... conrad and "easy morality" ... a theory of sediment of theory... mass culture, at last...four conrads .. THE HYSTERIA OF MASS CULTURE

145

critical mass ... can the skatepunk speak? ... homi don't play that...a sublime quilt... fieldwork in mass culture ... platform sneakers remix ... the filmic object...miss culture ... reification: or, the jaws oflife ... search for a

fi~re ... the

heist of class ... cu-

rious georg ... triadic allegories of totality... allegorizing interpretation ... ethics and hitchcocK ... the existence of jameson... the desire for nostalgia ... the end of the chapter... postrnodernism is always in taste ... vertiginous slime ... ftannelized jameson ... the revenge of the content ... postrnodernism as liberalism ... prolegomena to any fugue of the postrnodern ... taste and liberalism ... the rhetoric of taste ... sublime hysteria CONCLUSION: THE SYNOPTIC JAMESON

Works Cited Index

25 1

269

243

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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This book began as a dissertation I wrote while at York University in Toronto. So my greatest debt is to my Ph.D. supervisory committee: Ian Sowton, Terry Goldie, and Kim Michasiw. Ian is a wonderfully progressive and gentle teacher, and he has taught two or three generations of Canadian intellectuals. I learned a lot working with him, not least to trust my own idiosyncratic methodologies and style. Terry and Kim both kept me working to the edge of my capabilities, and encouraged me to see the relevance of Nine Inch Nails to Hegelian Marxism. My outside examiners, loan Davies and Jed Rasula, also provided readings that were both sympathetic and challenging. I don't think I could have written a dissertation and a book on Jameson without the strong support of my committee. But writing takes place in a larger context than the seminar room or library, and I received support, arguments, and interventions from a lot of people in the Toronto intellectual and writing communities. In particular, the comradeship of the following is gratefully noted: Ken Wilson, Christine Ramsey, Julie Sawatsky, Steve McCaffery, Jinnean Barnard, Peter Fitting, Kevin Connolly, Karen Mac Cormack, Victor Coleman, Libby Scheier, Lola Lemire Tostevin, jwcurry, Stan Fogel, Christopher Dewdney, Stuart Ross, Chris Wodsku, Jim Smith, Graham Barron, Lance La Rocque, and, of course, Paul Mergler. I'd also like to thank the anonymous readers at Duke University Press, and my editor, Reynolds Smith.

x

acknowled!Wlents

Last of all, I'd like to acknowledge the funding I received during the writing of the dissertation in the form of a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. C. B.

PREFACE

'.'

When Killdozer played in Toronto in early July 1994, they were promoting a new albwn called Uncompromising War On Art Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Touch and Go). Interviewed before the show, band member Dan Hobson commented: "What I miss is bands like Gang of Four and the Mekons because they could deal with politics but have a sense of humour and fun about it. We're not making fun of these ideas even if we do sometimes have a satiric edge. We do believe in what we're saying and I don't think having some fun with it takes anything away from that" (Anderson 30). This is the band, after all, which once put out an album called Intellectuals are the Shoeshine Boys of the Ruling Elite. The liner notes for the new album feature plenty of dead capitalists and quotations from Rosa Luxembourg and Fidel Castro; the tour poster rather anachronistically portrays Lenin below the Killdozer hammer and sickle and above Khrushchev's warning, "We will bury you!" Just to switch into cultural studies mode, then, the new Killdozer says a lot immediately about (a) the politics of indie rock; (b) the death of the Cold War narrative; (c) the way intellectuals look for support in mass culture; and (d) the possibility of engaging in critique while not taking it too seriously, And, coincidence of coincidences, these are some of the themes or lessons of the very book you're now holding in your hand at your local trendy bookstore, deliberating on whether to buy it ("Buy me before good sense insists / You'll strain your purse and sprain your wrists," as Vikram Seth rather

xii

pre fact