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P RI N T

ENGL-300: INTRODUCTION TO THEORY OF LITERATURE

Lecture 18 - The Political Unconscious [March 26, 2009]
Chapter 1. Marxist Aesthetics and Frederic Jameson [00:00:00]

Professor Paul Fry : Well, I'd like to begin by pointing out that the first name of Fredric Jameson is spelled F-r-e-d-r-i-c. The reason I point that out is that most scholars don't seem to be able to grasp that simple fact and that references to him, which are rife in the critical literature, perhaps one-third of the time spell his first name wrong. So I thought it would be important for y ou to be among the cognoscenti and to know that it is spelled in the way that I just mentioned. It's a strange thing. When I started teaching I taught many , many , many sections of English 1 29, and of course in the first semester, the first tex t that we read was The Iliad. Now "Iliad" is spelled I-l-i-a-d. Why it is that of the student population I taught ov er all those y ears, hundreds and hundreds of students, fully a third of them spelled it I-l-l-i-a-d I really couldn't say , but there are words that simply seem to be insusceptible to being spelled correctly , [laughs] and one of those words is the first name of Fredric Jameson, so stand adv ised. Okay . Now last time I talked about four possible options of an aesthetic nature for a Marx ist approach to literature, and passed them in rev iew. I mentioned realism, both realism according to the tastes and theoretical preferences of Engels and Lukacs, and also tendentious realism as it perv aded the Sov iet world, especially after 1 934; then also the participatory aesthetic of figures like Walter Benjamin, and the high Modernist aesthetic of the "whole" embraced particularly by Adorno-those last are the two aesthetic modes that we passed in rev iew last time--and finally , as a fifth notion, the idea that realism being somehow outworn, hav ing dev eloped hardening of the arteries as a kind of a bourgeois perspectiv e on things, needs somehow or another to be replaced aesthetically in the Marx ist v iew of things by something else. Perhaps the most eloquent proponent of replacing it with something is Jameson, who earlier in the introductory chapter of The Political Unconscious --much of which y ou'v e been assigned for today -writes a section which he calls "Magical Narrativ es" and which promotes, v ery much in keeping with the thinking of Northrop Fry e about the role of romance in society --and particularly the religious role of romance in society --proposes that an aesthetic of the romance which entails folklore, the folk tale, the fairy tale, and v arious forms of folk ex pression as a magical resolution of conflicts that can't otherwise be resolv ed, is the more appropriate aesthetic to take up. The long passage that I sent to y ou last night, which I'd like quickly to go ov er, is meant to further the promotion of this aesthetic and also to pose for us a critique of what the consequences would be of lingering with a realist aesthetic. So Jameson say s, on the second passage on y our sheet:
Le t Scott, Balzac and Dre ise r se rve as the [and re m e m be r that Balzac is the favorite author of Enge ls; Scott is the favorite author, at le ast in 1927, of Luk acs; and Dre ise r is a figure from the so-calle d naturalist m ove m e nt, the Am e rican nove list who is a ve ry appropriate addition to the list. It's in that conte x t that Jam e son is dropping the se particular nam e s] non-chronological m ark e rs of the e m e rge nce of re alism in its m ode rn form . The se first gre at re alism s are characte rize d by a fundam e ntal and e x hilarating he te roge ne ity in the ir raw m ate rials, and by a corre sponding ve rsatility in the ir narrative apparatus. At such m om e nts a ge ne ric confine m e nt to the e x iste nt [in othe r words, the only thing you have to do if you're a re alist is talk about things the way the y re ally are ] has a paradox ically libe rating e ffe ct on the re giste rs of the te x t and re le ase s a se t of he te roge ne ous historical pe rspe ctive s: the past for Scott, the future for Balzac, and the proce ss of com m odification for Dre ise r--norm ally fe lt to be inconsiste nt with a focus on the historical pre se nt.
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In other words, in Scott's treatment of history as dialectical, against the foil of the present there is env isioned a kind of romanticized ev ocation of a feudal past, and so it is in turn--I don't want to linger long ov er this with the other writers.
Inde e d, this m ultiple te m porality te nds to be se ale d off and re -containe d again in high re alism and naturalism [in othe r words, it starts ge tting too e asy, and the form ulas of re pre se nting and e vok ing the re al be gin to be com e , as I said, scle rotic. The y be gin to harde n. The y be gin to confine us in ways that had hithe rto be e n libe rating] whe re a pe rfe cte d narrative apparatus, in particular the thre e fold im pe rative s of authorial de pe rsonalization--that is to say, the voice in style indirect libre, authorial de pe rsonalization; unity of point of vie w, and re striction to sce nic re pre se ntation be gin to confe r on the re alistic option the appe arance of an asphyx iating se lf-im pose d pe nance .

In other words, "this is all I can say and this is the only way I can say it. There are no other possibilities of literary ex pression because I now feel confined to this reification of the real, this insistence that the real, the ev ocation of the real, is my only literary option, and so it's no longer liberating."
It is in the conte x t of this gradual re ification in late capitalism that the rom ance once again com e s to be fe lt as the place of narrative he te roge ne ity and fre e dom from the re ality principle .

That is, in a way , a jab at Freud, but at the same time an acknowledgement that Freud participates in a sort of growing despair ov er the necessity of confining oneself to the real, ev oking freedom from the reality principle to which a now oppressiv e realistic representation is the hostage.
Chapter 2. Romance at the Three Horizons [00:07:42]

Okay . So that's the aesthetic of Fredric Jameson, and before we begin an analy sis--that is to say , before we begin to consider his three horizons or concentric circles of interpretation--from other points of v iew, I thought it would be interesting to find this romance aesthetic in those three lev els. We're talking, of course, about the "political," the "social," and the "historical": the political, the kind of chronicle-like--as he puts it--record of successiv e happenings in a fictiv e contex t, constructed as a plot by some indiv idual v oice; the social as the conflict--or emergence into our awareness of its being a conflict--of what Jameson calls "ideologemes"--that is to say , way s of thinking about the world as ex pressed by disparate and conflicting classes; and then finally the historical, which Jameson calls "necessity ." At the end of the essay , he say s it's "what hurts," but in terms of literary analy sis, as we'll see, it has to do with understanding the ov erlap of the succession of modes of production as they unfold in historical time. We'll hav e more to say about modes of production, but our basic three horizons, then--in which I am now going to look for the romance aesthetic--our basic three horizons, then, are what Jameson calls the political, the social and the historical. It's important that he does sometimes call them concentric circles, because y ou hav e to understand that as y ou adv ance through the three stages, y ou're not leav ing any thing behind. The political is contained within the social and the social is contained within the historical. All of that is what is not to be left behind but is rather to be rethought, reconsidered. Jameson sometimes uses the word "rewritten," thinking of the tex t that is the object of one's study as one adv ances through these three stages. So that's why he thinks it appropriate to call them concentric circles. So what is the essential political moment of the creativ e act? Well, it's what Jameson, borrowing from Kenneth Burke, calls "the sy mbolic act." As an indiv idual writer, I undertake to resolv e sy mbolically a contradiction--and Marx ism is alway s about contradiction: that is to say , the way in which the perspectiv e of any class ex ists in a contradictory relation both with its own needs and desires and with other classes. In any case, then, the sy mbolic act at the political lev el is designed to resolv e a contradiction that can't be resolv ed by other means. In other words, it's a fantasy , it is the fairy tale, it is the princess and the pauper. It is the arbitrary happy ending tacked onto a situation
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for which in reality there would be no happy ending. In other words, it is a romance perspectiv e about the world, the realistic approach to which would somehow or another leav e us feeling much more confined. "Slumdog Millionaire" is an interesting ex ample. It's an auteur film made by Danny Boy le, an interesting ex ample of an indiv idual act which magically resolv es a contradiction through the whole Bolly wood apparatus that it brings to bear on it. The contradictions, of course, are rife between Hindu and Muslim, the contradictions entailed in globalization, the contradictions of caste--all of these contradictions, not to be resolv ed on a realistic plane, nev ertheless can be resolv ed by an indiv idual sy mbolic act: Y ou hit the Lotto. Y ou win against all odds a prize that makes y ou a millionaire. Who wants to be a millionaire? Well, we all [laughs] want to be millionaires, but only one of us miraculously , magically , through a series of completely implausible happenstances, is able to do so. Now notice this: it's not that it doesn't happen. People do hit the Lotto. People do win the $64,000 question or whatev er it is. It's not that it's absolute nev er-nev er land, but the point is--and I think this is really ultimately the point of that ex trav agant dance in the railroad station at the end of the film--the point is that ev en were it to happen in reality , it wouldn't resolv e contradictions. That is to say , y our life would not hav e that kind of scripted perfection: Y ou get the girl, ev ery thing is going to be perfect, and the whole world falls in line, dancing behind y ou. This just [laughter] doesn't happen. In other words, it can be sort of tragic to hit the Lotto, as many stories of that kind hav e made clear to us. That, it seems to me, is finally how the film is somewhat self-conscious about its nature as a sy mbolic act. Any way , that's the romance element of the political lev el of interpretation as understood by Jameson. Now the second lev el brings to the surface the element of subv ersion that has to be entailed in this same fairy tale resolution of a conflict that can't otherwise be resolv ed. There are all sorts of other aspects at the second lev el, but remember I'm discov ering the romance aesthetic here in all three lev els before turning to other matters hav ing to do with them. At the second lev el, on page 1 297 , the right-hand column, y ou hav e Ernst Bloch's understanding of the fairy tale. This is at the second lev el, about two thirds of the way down.
Thus, for instance , Bloch's re ading of the fairy tale , with its m agical wish-fulfillm e nts and its Utopian fantasie s of ple nty and the pays de Cocagne, re store s the dialogical ["The Big R ock C andy Mountain" basically is the pays de Cocagne] and antagonistic conte nt of this "form " by e x hibiting it as a syste m atic de construction and unde rm ining of the he ge m onic aristocratic form of the e pic

In other words, it's not just a sy mbolic act, the fairy tale. It is a thumbing of the nose at hegemony . It is, in other words, an act of antagonism which, of course, recognizes the impossibility of resolution or reconciliation precisely in its register of antagonism; so that at the second lev el, the social lev el, in which the ideological v oices of v arious classes and perspectiv e are openly in conflict, y ou don't get resolution. What y ou get is subv ersion and reaction. Y ou get, in other words, a tension of v oices that is not meant to resolv e any thing but is rather meant to lay bare the conflicts that are entailed. Still, howev er, in doing this y ou get the kind of carniv alesque uprising from below which Jameson associates with romance: that letting off of steam, that entertaining of the possibility of utopia that y ou get, for ex ample, in the early modern period on that day in which someone is called the Lord of Misrule, the entire social order for one day is inv erted, the low are elev ated to positions of authority , and for one day y ou get the key s to the castle, in effect. This is a day in which conflict is ex pressed and not resolv ed because ev ery body knows that tomorrow it's going to be the same oldsame old and back to business as usual; but there is still the romance element, the idea that folk
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ex pression is simultaneously the ex pression of a wish, a wish similar to the wish that's ex pressed at the first political lev el but the ex pression of a wish which is collectiv e--that is to say , in behalf of a class and a perspectiv e, and which is also, with great self-consciousness, not a wish that can in any way ex pect to be fulfilled, but rather one that is used subv ersiv ely with respect to the dominant ideology that it ex presses its abrasiv eness toward. The third lev el inv olv es the way in which there is at any giv en time at the historical lev el a dominant mode of production. A mode of production is a sy stem of thought or production generated by an ov erarching social or economic arrangement. Jameson lists them in his tex t, and we'll come back to them and we'll read that listing and we'll think about those terms; but Jameson giv es an ex cellent ex ample of the way in which, in the latter part of the eighteenth century , the Enlightenment began to be the dominant form of ex pression of an emergent mercantile, successfully capitalist bourgeoisie. That is to say , the v alues that drov e the dev elopment of industrialization and capital were those v alues emerging from feudal and aristocratic ideals that were less realistic, less engaged with actuality and the way in which y ou can actually get things done in the world. The Enlightenment is understood as an ex pression of an emerging new mode of production, or capitalism as it succeeds feudalism. But Jameson points out--and here's where romance comes in, and then after that we'll mov e on to our nex t point--that at the same time y ou get Enlightenment, at the same time that that does seem to become the dominant form of ex pression, y ou also get two modes of resistance or contestation. On the one hand y ou hav e Romanticism, which can be understood in this contex t as a kind of atav istic throwback to aristocratic and feudal idealism, codes of conduct, beliefs, v isions of utopia within Romanticism--all of them sort of try ing to recode in an age of Enlightenment v arious sorts of idealism that had come to seem outmoded. So that's a kind of, as it were, reactionary mode of production ov erlapping with or ex pressing itself through the dominant one. Then at the same time, y ou get folk resistance to the increasing mechanization of the Enlightenment. With Political Economy , with the rise of social engineering and with the v arious forms of social organization associated with Utilitarianism, y ou get folk resistance. Y ou get popular resistance in the forms of protest, "frame-breaking," disruption of labor activ ity , protest against industrialization, all of which also--because it insists on earlier forms of agricultural and industrial cottage industries and so on--is atav istic, also a throwback to the way in which labor is performed or conducted under feudalism. So that, too, in the form of folk ex pression--of longing for, in this case, a utopian past, more agrarian, more indiv idualized as a mode of labor, and more cottage-oriented--in all of this y ou get an ov erlapping mode of production. So the tension among modes of production, which is the focus of analy sis at the historical lev el, the third historical lev el, can also be understood in terms of the romance of utopian nostalgia.
Chapter 3. The Political Unconscious at the Three Horizons [00:22:18]

All right. So that , then, just to show how Jameson's aesthetic, his sense of the importance of romance, can be seen to perv ade the way in which he understands analy sis at all three of these lev els. So that's his aesthetic. The question then is: what is the interpretative pay off of undertaking literary analy sis at these three lev els? That is to say , why should we take the trouble to do it? What's so interesting about it? Well, from Jameson's point of v iew--this, of course, is the title of his book-each of these three modes of analy sis is designed to disclose, to uncov er, to lay bare an element of the "political unconscious." As for deconstruction, as for Freud, this sense of a political unconscious ex poses or rev eals something that is antithetical to ordinary consciousness--that is to say ,
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undermines our conv entional understanding of things, shows us that beneath our conv entional understanding of things there are laws and causes and dy namics at work that we need to understand. In this case, howev er, the unconscious in question is not a linguistic unconscious; it is not a psy chological unconscious. It is a political unconscious. Insofar, in other words, as we are political animals, the acts that we perform, the dialogues that we engage in, the modes of production that we participate in--all of them hav e political ramifications; that is to say , we do what we do, as opposed to doing other things, for political reasons of which we may not be fully aware--hence the emphasis in analy sis of this kind on the political unconscious. So again the three lev els. Going back to the idea of the "sy mbolic" act: what political unconscious, in other words, is rev ealed by a sy mbolic act? Well, Jameson giv es a wonderful ex ample taken from structuralism, and y ou can see that he leans v ery heav ily on structuralism for his understanding of the way in which something is going on in a narrativ e form of which it is not immediately apparent that any body can be aware. Take for ex ample Caduv eo face painting. Lev i-Strauss asks both in The Savage Mind and again in Tristes Tropiques : why the ex cessiv e complex ity of these paintings? Why the curious tension in the marks on the faces between the v ertical and the horizontal? Why , in other words, do y ou get a feeling of tension, of aesthetic beauty but also of tension and complication, in this cross-hatching, in this sense of the relation between the v ertical and the horizontal? So Jameson's argument, which he brings out more clearly than Lev i-Strauss--but Lev i-Strauss does say the same thing, contrasting the Caduv eo in this respect with neighboring tribes like the Bororo-his ex planation is that the Caduv eo are a hierarchical society in which there are open and obv ious forms of inequality that one must perforce be aware of as a member of the tribe, but that neighboring tribes, (and this is something that probably the tribe itself can observ e) work out a way of seeming to resolve the contradictions inherent in hierarchy by the ex change of moieties, which is to say , of kinship gifts and wedding gifts and so on--that Lev i-Strauss talks about. This ex change of moieties seems to impose on these social orders in real life, in real terms, a way of making society more equal than it might otherwise be. Y es, it's still hierarchical, but at the same time, wealth is distributed, each person has his own form of asserting dignity , and so on. The Caduv eo doesn't hav e this. Lev i-Strauss's and Jameson's point is that the Caduv eo nev er really worked that out, so they 're stuck with a simple form of hierarchical organization. Face painting, then, according to Lev i-Strauss followed by Jameson, is their way of sy mbolically resolv ing the problem by introducing the horizontal--by introducing, in other words, the way s in which other tribes hav e successfully offset hierarchy with way s of distributing wealth and prestige more equally . The sy mbolic act which other tribes were able to accomplish in real life, in real terms, the Caduv eo accomplish indiv idually , with each indiv idual woman painting her face as a sy mbolic act, a sy mbolic act ex pressing the political unconscious-- because this is not an act, we suppose, of which any indiv idual is aware. The unawareness, the lack of consciousness of what's going on in a story , is much more readily av ailable to us in the Oedipus my th because that's the part of Lev i-Strauss's "Structural Study of My th" that we happen to hav e read. The next part is [laughs] Caduv eo face painting, but in "The Structural Study of My th," Lev i-Strauss begins by talking about the Oedipus my th. Well, the whole point of that is, "Gee, there's a terrible contradiction, born from two or born from one." Plainly , no indiv idual v ersion of the story , certainly not Sophocles' v ersion, is say ing to itself, "Oh, this is a terrible contradiction. I don't know whether I'm born from two people or born from one person." That is the unconscious, in other words, of the story which is brought out, brought to the surface, by
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a structuralist analy sis of the my th. Jameson doesn't talk about it because it's not in any obv ious and immediate way a political problem or a problem susceptible of Marx ist analy sis. It is perhaps ultimately --ev ery thing is--but not immediately , and so he turns instead to a discussion of the Caduv eo my th, which has as its unconscious an issue that's obv iously a political one, but it is nev ertheless the case that a structural analy sis of a sy mbolic act is designed to and will inev itably rev eal an element of unconscious thought, political or otherwise. That then is the way in which the political unconscious, as Jameson describes it, is brought out at the first political lev el of understanding, the indiv idual sy mbolic act. Now at the second lev el, the social, in which the tex t, as Jameson say s, rewrites itself not as an indiv idual act but as, v ery much in the spirit of Bakhtin, a heteroglossal ex pression of v oices, of points of v iew, writing themselv es as it were through the tex t--there the political unconscious in question is something that has to be understood in terms of ideologemes. In other words, people reflex iv ely ex press, perhaps unbeknownst to themselv es, v iews and opinions which are intelligible not arising out of their indiv iduality , not because they are who they are, as they themselv es might say --but rather because of their economic class and prestige status. In other words, because of their place in the world, it follows that they will hold certain v iews. They will be the mouthpieces, in other words, for certain ideologemes, and those ideologemes Jameson understands to be at least in part unconscious. One doesn't know, in other words, that the opinions one so ferv ently ex presses and so dev outly believ es in are opinions conditioned by the social circumstances in which one finds oneself, so that literature then becomes a kind of drama of ideologemes, a representation of unresolv ed conflict that manifests in the v ariety of class or status v oices brought to bear. Y ou can see this is the point at which Jameson's work is closest to Bakhtin's and most clearly reflects some of the preoccupations of Bakhtin as we hav e encountered them already . Jameson giv es a v ery good ex ample of the way in which this conflict works--because part of the my stery of these clashes is that they alway s present themselv es within a shared code. This already begins to look forward to the idea of the mode of production. At the bottom of page 1 296, Jameson is talking about the v iolent religious controv ersies of the sev enteenth century in England between Cav alier and Roundhead, with all the controv ersies surrounding the interregnum of Cromwell, the restoration of Charles the Second, and the tremendous ferment, largely religious ferment, taking place during that period; but this ferment for any Marx ist--and Christopher Hill is the leading historian writing about this period who has made it most clearly intelligible in these terms--for any Marx ist this conflict has an underly ing political unconscious: that is, its ultimate motiv es are an assertion of rights and an ex pression of class v iews. This is the way Jameson puts it, bottom of page 1 296: "the normal form of the dialogical is essentially an antagonistic one" He's alluding here to Bakhtin, for whom frequently the dialogical is simply a kind of happy cacophony of v oices, a carniv alesque ex pression of chaos from below, all of which is a kind of y east-like ferment, and somehow or another in the long run energizing and socially progressiv e. But Jameson points out that the ideologeme is v ery often ex pressiv e of conflict as well, an antagonistic one, and that the dialogue of class struggle is one in which two opposing discourses fight it out within the general unity of a shared code. Thus, for instance, the shared master code of religion becomes in the 1 640s in England the place in which the dominant formulations of a hegemonic theology are re-appropriated and polemically modified. In other words, the Church of England stands for--and this is the word that was used--"establishment." Roundhead points of v iew, v arious forms of Puritanism and other forms of religious rebellion, are antiestablishment, and y et they are all coded within the discourse of the Christian religion. That is to say , they hav e to fight it out on a
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common battlefield, and that's the way it is with conflict of this kind. May be a contemporary ex ample would be not so much in the sphere of religion. Well, today one could speak again of religion, but in the six ties and sev enties it was may be more a question of ethics. Think, for ex ample, of the sex ual rev olution. Again there is a common ground, a sense of the centrality of sex ual conduct to human life; but what y ou get in--not so much, perhaps, the conflict of classes as conflict of generations in this case--what y ou get in the conflict of generations is an inv ersion of v alues, not a new set of v alues ex actly but a simple transv aluation of what ex ists. Ev ery thing that one faction considers bad, another faction transv alues and considers good. The v ery thing against which one is warned is the thing that one rushes to embrace and so on. So once again y ou get a clash, an unresolv ed clash, but a clash that arises from and participates in the semiotic structure of a common code, right? That's the way in which social antagonism ex presses itself at the second lev el, and it usually inv olv es, because there are underly ing interests, elements of the political unconscious and brings to the surface elements of the political unconscious. Finally , at the third lev el what comes out, what is made manifest, is the tension or clash among modes of production as they jostle each other historically . It's understood that the danger, as Jameson puts it, of thinking in terms of a succession of modes of production is that each one of those modes of production might seem like a sy nchronic moment. In other words, if y ou're in capitalism, y ou might get lulled into thinking that no other mode of production is av ailable. If y ou're in patriarchy , y ou might get lulled into thinking that no other mode of production is av ailable; y et as Jameson points out, the tension between corporate hierarchy and patriarchal hierarchy --the tension, in other words, which v ery often driv es a wedge and has driv en a wedge in polemic between Marx ist and feminist points of v iew--is a reflection of the coex istence of modes of production from completely different eras: one contemporary , one completely --at least insofar as it was the dominant--a thing of the past, and y et persisting and still ov erlapping with a mode of production that is contemporary .
Chapter 4. Literary Analysis: Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" [00:38:08]

All of that is simply a matter of historical fact, but in literary analy sis y ou begin to think of it in more formal terms, and y ou see, for ex ample, the v ery choice of v erse form--and I'm taking as an ex ample Shelley 's famous poem "The Ode to the West Wind"--y ou see the v ery choice of v erse form as an instance of what Jameson calls "the ideology of form" that can be understood in terms of the conflict of modes of production. The v erse form of Shelley 's "Ode to the West Wind" has fiv e strophes, and each strophe is ex actly the same in form. It is simultaneously a sonnet and--the first twelv e lines of which, concluding in a couplet--a succession of terza rima. Now these two forms brought together, sy nthesized as a single strophic form in Shelley , are coded in entirely different way s. Each aspect of them has an ideology . Terza rima is coded "prophecy " because it is in the tradition of Dante. It's the v erse form in which The Divine Comedy is written, and it is a mode that is ex pressiv e of hope that resolv es all contradiction in the div ine, in the rev elation of the div ine, in the Paradiso ; so that terza rima ex presses for Shelley the hope of the poem, which is that the west wind will be through him the trumpet of a political prophecy . If winter's here, can spring be far behind? Rev olution is in the offing, ev ery thing's going to be great. But at the same time, the poem is shot through with a kind of pessimism--a sort of, if y ou will, realism; an awareness that this notion of prophecy is rather farfetched. Why should the wind do his bidding? The wind is just wind. It's not inspiration. Therefore, the v ery stanza which is written in
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terza rima is written at the same time as a sonnet, fourteen lines. The first stanza in particular is coded not just as a sonnet but also as an allusion specifically to one sonnet, Shakespeare's sev enty third sonnet, which begins "That time of y ear in me thou may est behold"--in which I'm getting old. I don't hav e any hair left. I'm just a bare-ruined choir where late sweet birds sang. In other words, I am in a parlous state, I am getting old, and there's nothing to be done about it. At the end of the poem, the embers of my fire are about to be snuffed out. There is just no hope for it. That's the way it is: y ou get old. In other words, winter's here and spring isn't coming. There is no prophetic possibility . There is only the reality of the trajectory of a life spent. If there is rise, there is also fall. If there is dev elopment, there is also decline and decay , and these, as the sonnet form codes it, are simple facts of life that poetic idealism, that Romanticism, cannot ov erride. So what y ou get in Shelley 's v erse form is a tension between ideas, the prophetic idea which y ou can associate with a feudal and theocentric world in which the contradictions of reality really can be resolv ed theologically , on the one hand, and a kind of proto-realist tradition in which we just hav e to come to terms with the way things are, coded through--which is, after all, proto-Enlightenment, and Shakespeare is often sort of thought of as a proto-Enlightenment figure--the sonnet. So formally , both the terza rima and the sonnet participate in what Jameson calls "the ideology of form," and they reflect modes of production, feudal and Enlightenment respectiv ely . They reflect attitudes that one can associate with those modes of production. So that's an ex ample of the way in which the political-perhaps one had better call it quasi-conscious because Shelley was an incredibly self-conscious poet--the way in which the political "quasi-conscious" ex presses itself at the third or historical lev el of analy sis.
Chapter 5. The Formal Emphasis at the Three Horizons [00:43:34]

Now in formal terms--and I hav e already sort of gotten into this, and I'll go through it rather quickly because there isn't much time left--in formal terms we can think of the essential critical task at the first or political lev el as one of thematization. That is to say , what theme is the plot structure of an indiv idual sy mbolic act try ing to ex press? What is the contradiction that's being resolv ed in this sy mbolic act? At the second lev el, the formal principle that we do bring to bear is the idea, the Bakhtinian idea, of heteroglossia: the clash of v oices, the way in which the v oice is no longer indiv idual but rather social, the representativ e of a social point of v iew that ex presses itself through the indiv idual author's writing. At the third lev el, y ou get what Jameson calls "a repertoire of dev ices," and I hav e already reflected a little bit on that. Let me just add another ex ample, also taken from Romanticism, in keeping with Jameson's ex emplification of the ov erlap of modes of production as being particularly interesting in the age of Enlightenment. In Romanticism there is a long tradition leading up to it of the formal Pindaric ode. Wordsworth is still making use of that tradition in writing his ode, "Intimations of Immortality ," but in the meantime he and Coleridge hav e dev eloped a new kind of ode, if y ou will, which is called the "conv ersation poem": Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey " are notable ex amples of the conv ersation poem. Now the difference is v ery clearly intelligible in terms of a conflict of modes of production. The formal ode, deriv ed ultimately from Pindar celebrating Oly mpic v ictories of aristocratic patrons in Greece--horse races, foot races, wrestling matches: that's the original purpose to which the formal ode was put--plainly is coded once again as feudal-aristocratic, whereas the conv ersation poem belongs v ery much, as the word suggests, in the public sphere. It's the atmosphere of the
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coffeehouse. It's the atmosphere in which people sit down and talk together, ex change v iews, and address each other. It is a poem alway s of address to some indiv idual person that turns to that person at a certain point, ev okes the nature of that person, sometimes solicits that person's opinions. In other words, it's a poem that performs dialogism. It's a poem that performs the sense of the giv e-and-take of a much more open, democratic culture in the public sphere. So y ou can see that the v ery transition from the formal ode to the conv ersation poem is itself intelligible as a transition between--or what Jameson calls "a cultural rev olution" brought in by a seismic shift in--modes of production.
Chapter 6. Acknowledged Interpretive Dangers [00:47:16]

All right. So these ex emplify , in v arious way s, what can be done with these three lev els. Jameson himself reminds us of the dangers. If we think of a narrativ e as a sy mbolic act, we are much too prone either to forget that it's based on reality by emphasizing the structuralist nature of what's going on or to forget that form is inv olv ed at all by emphasizing the social contradiction that's being resolv ed. As Jameson say s, these two dangers at the first lev el are the danger of structuralism and the danger of v ulgar materialism. The point in analy zing the sy mbolic act is to sustain a balance or a sy nthesis between formal and social elements within the tex t. At the second lev el, the problem is that if we start thinking in terms of un-reconcilable class conflict, our analy sis can become static, as though class perspectiv es didn't shift, as though one perspectiv e might not succeed another as the hegemonic: in other words, as though change didn't take place, as though there was alway s the same old-same old in class conflict. The boss is alway s going to speak demeaningly of the worker. The worker is alway s going to laugh at the boss behind his back. This is the way it is; this is the way it will alway s be. There are static relations in other words among the classes that history can't resolv e. Finally , at the third lev el, there is the danger of thinking in terms of impasse--late capitalism, for ex ample, as an impasse that simply can't be surmounted. Think of Adorno and his incredible gloom about the culture industry . There isn't much hope in Adorno, [laughs] is there? And by the same token, y ou could argue that poor old Jameson talking about history as necessity , history as what hurts, history as just what has happened--by the same token, y ou could argue that Jameson, too, is perhaps a little bit subject to this sense of impasse, which is why I quote for y ou, as these people themselv es often do, the ringing warning of Marx in the Elev enth Thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers hav e only interpreted the world in v arious way s. The point, howev er, is to change it." That is ultimately the focus of Marx 's analy sis.
Chapter 7. Application: Tony the Tow Truck [00:49:55]

Let's rev isit Tony in the remaining minute. Now a reified realist approach to Tony , the kind that Jameson criticizes on the sheet, would point out that nothing happens to Neato and Speedy . They are manifest v illains, and y et at the same time, nothing can happen to them. They simply hav e their place in the social order: one of them is a fastidious aristocrat who doesn't want to get dirty , the other is completely committed to productiv ity and the time clock and the work ethic, a bourgeois Speedy . There they are; nothing to be done. They 're not nice to Tony but nothing happens to them. There is no recrimination. But then at the first lev el, if we understand this as a sy mbolic act, the resolution of what would otherwise be a hopeless conflict is through friendship--the friendship of Bumpy and Tony ; the fact that it's perfectly okay if I'm just a working guy . I'v e got my buddies. We go out. We drink beer. We hav e a good time. Life is great. It doesn't matter, in other words, that there's a class structure, that
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there's a social sy stem. "I'm happy ," Tony say s in effect. "I like my job." That in itself, of course, is a resolution, [laughs] is a sy mbolic act and a resolution in adv ance of the conflicts that the story might otherwise manifest. At the second lev el, y ou get the discourse of ideologemes. "I can't help y ou," say s Neato the car. "I don't want to get dirty ." "I can't help y ou," say s Speedy the car. "I am too busy ." "I can help y ou," say s Bumpy ; but notice that this is all within an indiv idual, single code, and that's what the complete parallelism of these three utterances shows us. Within a single code, these ideologemes, which can't really be resolv ed, get themselv es ex pressed. All right. Now finally modes of production: plainly , the v ery ex istence of Neato and Speedy in the same story suggests that there is a certain tension between the feudal and the bourgeois at work, but it's not a tension that in any way necessarily works itself out. The important thing to notice here, it seems to me, is the conflict between pulling and pushing. It's v ery interesting--and I'v e said this before--that a tow truck, something that pulls--and once again Tony is a mode of production, right? He's a tow truck, right? And something that pulls has to be pushed. Bumpy , like the Little Engine that Could, is a sort of a throwback to an earlier, less energized, less powerful mode of production. He has to push. Think of the way walls get put up: a prefabricated wall before the inv ention of the crane and the pulley has to be pushed up by a bunch of people. Pushing is the essential labor mode before the kind of technology arises that makes it possible to pull something. After that, y ou hav e a crane. Y ou run the hook down, and y ou just pull the wall up into place. Before then, y ou got may be one person standing on a rafter with a rope kind of pulling but ev ery body else is down on the ground pushing; and so the relationship between pushing and pulling in the story is a crucially important one which suggests the ov erlap of older and newer modes of production, all of which can be resolv ed at Jameson's third or historical lev el of analy sis. Okay . So much then for Jameson and for Tony . We'll be coming back to Tony again nex t time in the contex t of talking about the New Historicism. [end of transcript] Top (#n av i gati on -top)

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