Cultural theory – Fredric Jameson: “Always historicize!”

Many German philosophers and theorists of the 20th century – from Martin Heidegger to the Frankfurt School to Walter Benjamin – are widely read abroad. In French, English and even Spanish-speaking countries there are entire schools based on them. Conversely, however, these readings are often little noticed. You may know some big names from theory, but only a few are received systematically. This is particularly clear in the case of the American cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, who died on September 22, 2024 at the age of 90. Numerous obituaries paid tribute to the “great literary critic, theorist and Marxist” (“Zeit”), one of “the most influential Marxist critics and literary theorists” (“Taz”) or the “exceptional theorist” (“WOZ”), who “was in Germany at the time life remained strangely unknown” (“Spiegel”). But what did Jameson stand for?

Beyond the culture industry

Fredric Jameson is one of the most influential literary scholars in Great Britain and the USA today. His work is strongly influenced by British cultural studies, German critical theory and French existentialists and post-structuralists. Nevertheless, only a few of his books have been translated into German, especially not his best-known work “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. In the mid-1980s, Jameson undertook a diagnosis of the present based on various cultural phenomena, from art to film, video, literature and architecture to postmodern theory. He expanded Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of culture industry with theories from the situationist Guy Debord and the simulation and media theorist Jean Baudrillard about the increasing totalization of capitalist production logic.

Jameson countered the right-wing idea of ​​the “end of history” by saying that everything was now “more than ever united in a single story.”

For this reason, Jameson is often considered the most important critic of “postmodernism”. But above all, he contextualized postmodern art and theory in their historical-materialist contexts and placed them in continuity with processes that had their origins in the cultural tendencies of modernism. This is actually his real criticism of postmodernism, which no longer historicizes itself, but rather wildly cannibalizes the entire history of culture. In postmodern codes, the modern stylistic device of the quote becomes a superficial, historyless collage, a “pastiche”. Jameson also countered the “end of great narratives” proclaimed by postmodern theory: the pastiche, he wrote, lumps together the high and popular cultures of the world into a metanarrative of global capitalism that constantly refers only to itself. For Jameson, this was only the logical consequence of the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production itself, which now also subordinated culture to itself, more completely than the modern “culture industry” could.

Strictly dialectical

Terms like pastiche, as well as individual sentences from his books (“Always historicize!”) are often quoted. The sentence attributed to him by Mark Fisher also made him famous on the German left: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

But the real meaning of Fredric Jameson’s work lies in his dialectical method. In Jameson’s texts, dialectics is a dynamic movement of thought that allows the object of investigation to be grasped in its historical-materialistic “totality.” In Hegel’s famous example of the master-slave dialectic, for Jameson the slave is “not the opposite of the master, but, together with him, an equally integral part of the larger system called slavery or domination.” If global capitalism is a totalizing system, dialectics must respond to it with a total analysis.

So, precisely after the fall of the Soviet Union and the academic delegitimization of Marxism, Jameson held up both the conservative-liberal jubilee of capitalism and the left-wing anti-Marxists with an analysis that maintained the claim to utopian possibilities, especially in mass culture. Jameson countered the right-wing idea of ​​the “end of history” – formulated with reference to Hegel of all people – by saying that the previously diverse, contingent historical processes and possible futures were now “more than ever united in a single history”. The postmodern left pitted “heterotopias,” “nomadism,” or “différance” against a supposedly “totalitarian” Marxist claim that sought to analyze a given society and its historical formation as a whole. Jameson always reminded people that it was still important to “call the system by its name.”

Thinking in catastrophe

Mark Fisher’s statement about the impossibility of conceiving the end of capitalism is therefore also a distortion of Jameson’s analysis. He expressed this idea several times, but mostly in a modified form, namely by holding on to the power of the utopian: “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We can now revise this; in fact, what we are seeing is an attempt to imagine capitalism by imagining the end of the world.” Jameson was making an observation that could have come directly from Walter Benjamin.

Like Benjamin’s work, Jameson’s also revolves around historical movement and the conditions of possibility for utopian thinking in the advancing catastrophe of capitalism. Benjamin expanded the dialectical method with two important aspects that Jameson adopted from him. First, he used Benjamin’s reflections on allegory to think of ambiguity and simultaneity that are condensed in a given historical object – a text or a work of art. In doing so, Jameson countered orthodox Marxism, which could only think of dialectics between two opposites (proletariat and bourgeoisie, base and superstructure, etc.), as well as liberal pluralism, which tended towards arbitrariness, with a way of thinking that could “call the bad whole by its name” without to underestimate the complicated resistances and dynamics within oneself.

Second, Jameson recognized in Benjamin’s messianism the potential to think utopia and hope in defeat. For Jameson, Benjamin’s famous “Angel of History” expresses the experience of defeat, but not the end of history (and thus of possible futures). He reminds us of Kafka’s statement that there is hope, just not for us.

Such considerations were not abstract for Jameson; He was not interested in a philosophy of history, but rather in concrete work on the material. Despite all the criticism, it was close to the postmodern theories. The trained Romanist, who had done his doctorate on Sartre, followed closely what was happening in France in the 1960s and 1970s. Like the French thinkers of the post-war period, Jameson wanted not philosophy, but… theory and thereby free oneself from the systemic, abstract demands of philosophy. This also involved turning to everyday things; It was no coincidence that the Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre wrote his “Critique of Everyday Life” during this time.

Philosophize over a glass of beer

In a famous anecdote, the French philosopher Raymond Aron said to Jean-Paul Sartre, sitting in a Parisian café: “That means: you can philosophize about this glass of beer.” (Jameson – “always historicize!” – corrected: it was actually a mint liqueur). These theorists were no longer concerned with logic or being itself, but with a comprehensive philosophy of practice (following Antonio Gramsci) that recognized no disciplinary boundaries and brought together philosophers with sociologists, anthropologists with literary scholars, historians with linguists. In the German version, this culminated in the question of the later Merve publisher Peter Gente to Adorno: “Is theory practical or not?”

In his work, Jameson also historicized the “years of theory” in France, from their beginnings in the Resistance through the intellectual flowering of the 50s and 60s, the revolution of the universities by the “68ers” to their decline in the context of the neoliberal restructuring of the French society under Francois Mitterand, who also pushed theory back into philosophy institutes at universities.

One could also describe Jameson himself as a product of this era, as one of its “epigons,” as he himself critically called the theoreticians left today. But his dialectical approach, which combined originality and critical openness in dealing with such theories with a consistent connection to the historical-materialist method of Marxism, saved Jameson’s thinking from ossification. His work, which lies somewhere between cultural studies, criticism and theory, is just as indispensable for a diagnosis of the 20th century as it is for preparing for what awaits us in the 21st.