He taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of California at San Diego, before moving to Duke University in 1985, and he stayed there until he retired. He said: “I have never wanted to make a very great distinction between philosophy and literature. It seems to me that one reads both — they’re both a form of enjoyment, if you like. . . . They’re both the invention of languages — that’s what I should say.” Therefore, we regard Jameson as a philosopher, as well as a literary and cultural critic, who is primus inter pares. He disagrees with Ludwig Wittgenstein about there being no private languages: “It seems to me that the great modern writers are all inventors of a different language.” All novelists have their private languages, and we, as readers and critics, gain a deep and fulfilling access to this language (I like to think of it as a version of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ inscape), coupled with their myriad modes of thinking and inner mental landscapes, as we read.
I first read Fredric Jameson as a graduate student in 1981, at Dalhousie University, in Canada, where I was studying as a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar. One of our English Department’s brightest professors had, on his reading list, Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (published 1981) — which earned him lasting renown and adulation — and which opens with the well-recognised Jamesonianism: Always historicise! This professor also had Jameson’s The Prison-House of Language which assimilates Russian Formalism and French structuralism and Semantics, and Marxism and Form on his graduate seminar’s reading list, together with works by other philosophers and critics who had inspired Jameson. Our dear colleague at the University of Pittsburgh, the affable and erudite John Beverley, was one of Jameson’s renowned students.
Reading these texts also led me to re-reading some of Erich Auerbach — who supervised Jameson’s doctoral dissertation at Yale: Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961) — and whose seminal work, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, my mother, Professor Prabhat Nalini Das — Fulbright Smith-Mundt Scholar, and a favourite student of Murray Krieger and John Hospers, at the University of Minnesota — had enthused me into reading when I was an undergraduate student in India. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism marked the capture of the postmodern by Jameson, and set the terms for all future discussion on the subject, as Perry Anderson notes.
A few years after my time at Dalhousie University, and after I had moved to Carnegie Mellon University, in 1989, I met Fred Jameson, with friends who were personally rather close to him, and members of The Marxist Literary Group, of which he was founder, in 1969. I was pleased to have listened to his lectures, and met him, on more than one occasion; and I wondered, as ever, at how someone in possession of eximius brilliance, and extraordinary and powerful literary output, could stay so grounded, and unassuming. Above all, Jameson is a Marxist critic: and, as Cornel West calls him, “the most significant Marxist thinker in American culture.”
The crisis in the postmodern era, per Jameson, is chiefly a crisis of historicity — the loss of a sense of history — which he cited and used as the definitive basis for literary and cultural analysis, critique, and, concomitantly, of a meaningful life. Therefore, we now encounter what a Marxist critic calls “the replacement of deep feeling with new, random intensities and by the “schizophrenic” culture of late-capitalist, consumer society . . . .” This is Guy Debord’s “culture of the spectacle”. Contrasting Vincent van Gogh‘s painting of a peasant’s shoes (high modernism), to those by Andy Warhol (postmodernism), Jameson notices a “new kind of flatness and depthlessness, and a new kind of superficiality” in the latter. The schism between our present lives, and an illuminating and felt sense of the past, of history, is profound. Jameson writes:”What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally, the frantic economic urgency of producing ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes) at ever great rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.”Citing Jameson’s “double achievement”, a critic praises him for “not only (having) said so much of brilliance and utility, but for (having existed), uncompromising and uncompromised.” In The Political Unconscious, one narrative, in Jameson’s memorable rhetoric, concerns “the construction of the bourgeois subject in emergent capitalism and its schizophrenic disintegration in our time.” He examines this disintegration through the works of George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, and Wyndham Lewis. Jameson calls commodification the “primary law of our kind of society: it isn’t only objects that are subject to commodification, it is anything that is capable of being named.” Quinlan Terry, the famous British architect who rejected modernism, dwells on the urgency of our need to recognize that “money as an end in itself is obviously destroying everything.”
Again, Terry Eagleton, who is Jameson’s chief competitor for the position of “most important Marxist critic now writing”, unabashedly says that Jameson does not write, but composes, in “a burnished elegance and unruffled poise, which allows him to sustain a rhetorical lucidity through the most tortuous, intractable material.”
Jameson’s students, and all those who were influenced by him, marvelled, for decades, at his formidable mastery of philosophy, literature, film, art, and architecture, as well as his effortless pre-eminence as a committed, revolutionary thinker. In an interview, he says: “I am possibly deep down just a Sartrean, although I don’t use that language any more.” His virtuoso definition of art is very much in the line of T S Eliot‘s Tradition and the Individual Talent and Clement Greenberg’s Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Through the course of his life, as a thinker and critic, Jameson stood, unfaltering, with his key subjects: ideology, totality, utopia, and form.
Only a few days before his passing, tributes were paid to Jameson on turning 90. His Inventions of the Present: the Novel in its Crisis of Globalization was released earlier this year, and Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present is forthcoming. In his last decade, Jameson was less stern, if you will, and there is a pronounced “mysticism that runs through all his work”. We need to construe this “in the sense of the unseen and unexpected unity of all things, the visible and invisible, beyond the threshold of experience, and the flashes of intuition of this unity in consciousness”. Impressively, Jameson was not hostile to occasionally alluding to religion or theology.
Let me end with Jameson’s prescient lament and warning to “intellectuals” in Fables of Aggression (1991):
“[I]t is rather the essential ‘innocence’ of intellectuals which is here in question: this private inner game of ‘theoretical’ convictions and polemics against imaginary conceptual antagonists and mythic counterpositions, . . . of passionate private language and private positions, which, entering the field of force of the real social world, take on a murderous and wholly unsuspected power.”
It is this rabid, unethical, and entirely saturnine power in the real social world — which proliferates at manic speed, especially in the social media, often resulting in destruction, and unrelenting misery, perpetrated on large swathes of poor and innocent people — played out by private players and “intellectuals” (self-styled, or otherwise), in their private inner game, that the world needs to be wary about.