Doug
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[from Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (Verso, 1998), pp. 128-131]
What they [Jameson and Braudel] seem to share is a reserve towards the political conceived in a strong sense - that is, as an independent domain of action, pregnant with its own consequences.
In Braudel's case, this reticence is coherent with the whole structure and programme of his work. In the case of a Marxist, it might be doubted whether this could be so. Jameson, however, has offered reasons why it might be. In the most calculatedly shocking of his texts, he suggests a natural kinship between one of the most extreme versions of neo-liberalism - the universal modelling of human behaviour as utility-maximization by the Chicago economist Gary Becker - and socialism, in so far as both do away with the need for any political thought. 'The traditional complaint about Marxism that it lacks any autonomous political reflection', he writes, 'tends to strike one as a strength rather than a weakness'. For Marxism is not a political philosophy, and while 'there certainly is a Marxist practice of politics, Marxist political thinking, when it is not practical in that way, has exclusively to do with the economic organization of society and how people cooperate to organize production'. The neo-liberal belief that in capitalism only the market matters is thus a close cousin of the Marxist view that what counts for socialism is planning: neither have any time for political disquisitions in their own right. 'We have much in common with the; neo-liberals, in fact virtually everything - save the essentials!'."
Behind the buoyant provocation of these lines lies a conviction of principle - it is no accident Mallarme's formula reappears just here. But they also correspond to a sense of immediate priorities. Returning to his tripartite scheme at the end of The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson remarks of Tahimik's film that what is instructive about it is 'the way in which here the economic dimension has come to take precedence over a political one which is not left out or repressed, but which is for the moment assigned a subordinate position and role'. For this is a general lesson of the time. In the present conjuncture, of postmodernity, 'our most urgent task will be tirelessly to denounce the economic forms that have come for the moment to reign supreme and unchallenged' - 'a reification and
commodification that have become so universalized as to seem well-nigh natural and organic entities'." Even the politics of national liberation itself can only be inscribed in this larger battle.
Jameson's theoretical programme - we might call it, in honour of its epigraph, a materialist symbolism - has thus been formidably consistent. Its coherence can be verified a contrario by the one significant absence in its appropriation of the Western Marxist repertoire. For that tradition was not without a supremely political moment. Antonio Gramsci is the one great name substantially missing from the roll-call of Marxism and Form. In part, that is no doubt due to the sidelong position of Italy in Jameson's imposing usufruct of the resources of European culture as a whole, where France, Germany and England are the lands of reference. But it is also that Gramsci's work, the product of a Communist leader in prison, reflecting on the defeat of one revolution and the ways to possible victory of another, does not fit the bifurcation of the aesthetic and economic. It was eminently political, as a theory of the state and civil society, and a strategy for their qualitative transformation. This body of thought is by-passed in Jameson's extraordinary resumption of Western Marxism.
Who can say that his intuition was wrong? The grandeur of the Sardinian is stranded today, amid the impasse of the intellectual tradition he represented, plain for all to see. The current of history has passed elsewhere. If the legacies of Frankfurt or Paris or Budapest remain more available, it is also because they were less political - that is, subject to the 'contingencies and reversals' peculiar to l'histoire evenementielle, as Jameson has seen it." The purification of Western Marxism to the aesthetic and economic has, as things stand, been vindicated. The theory of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is its dazzling issue. Yet at the same time, precisely here the forclusion of the political poses a paradox. Jameson construes the postmodern as that stage In capitalist development when culture becomes in effect coextensive with the economy. What is the appropriate stance, then, of the critic within this culture? Jameson's answer rests on a three-fold distinction. There is taste, or opinion, that is a set of subjective preferences - in themselves of little interest - for particular works of art. Then there is analysis, or the objective study of 'the historical conditions of possibility of specific forms'. Finally there is evaluation, which involves no aesthetic judgements in the traditional sense, but rather seeks to 'interrogate the quality of social life by way of the text or individual work of art, or hazard an assessment of the political effects of cultural currents or movements with less utilitarianism and a greater sympathy for the dynamics of everyday life than the imprimaturs and indexes of earlier traditions'.