While perhaps more important in literary circles than political, Frederic Jameson is a very important Marxist who died today.

I heard someone once say that Jameson is probably singularly responsible for keeping American Marxism on life support during the interregnum by hiding it in the English department. Kind of wild to think that the former now has life again while the latter isn’t going to surivive

While I don’t want to suggest a formal reading club, I wonder if we might just provide some Jameson quotations and our own glosses on them in honor of an important comrade (even if he was, at the end of the day, just an academic and not a revolutionary).

To start, I’ll provide perhaps one of the most famous (and important) bits from The Political Unconscious:

History is therefore the experience of Necessity, and it is this alone which can forestall its thematization or reification as a mere object of representation or as one master code among many others. Necessity is not in that sense a type of content, but rather the inexorable form of events; it is therefore a narrative category in the enlarged sense of some properly narrative political unconscious which has been argued here, a retextualization of History which does not propose the latter as some new representation or “vision,” some new content, but as the formal effects of what Althusser, following Spinoza, calls an “absent cause.”

Here, I think in somewhat dense language, Jameson is really trying to promote history to some term beyond historicity. To put it another way, Jameson’s capital “H” History here is the material world before its interpretation by human agents. I think this is borne out by the next (and more famous line):

Conceived in this sense, History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.

Emphasis is mine here. I think that really this gets to Jameson’s conception of what material reality is - it’s in some sense “beyond” any individual (or even collective) agency but nevertheless we act within and upon it. There’s a kind of screen (the screen of Interpretation or representation, which the preceding chapter discusses) that always prohibits our real access to “History” that we are nevertheless part of and embedded in.

Anyway, I’d love to see some other passages from comrades. I’ll post a couple more as well as I procrastinate this week.

RIP to a real one. Abusing my mod powers to sticky this, since he was influential for me.