Frederic Jameson 2013 at a conference of the Brazilian cultural project “Fronteiras do Pensamentos”
Photo: wikimedia/Fronteiras do Pensamento
I don’t really care about mourning prominent men in the scientific community. Simply because other people do it: namely men who, it has been proven, not only like to and often, but actually predominantly refer to their own sex; whether dead or alive. The university professor Fredric Jameson also did this – a quick look at any essay proves it. Nevertheless, the literary scholar, who died on September 22, 2024, is worth a few words to me. Jameson was, in fact, one of the last public Marxist intellectuals; Even an appreciative obituary in Die Zeit admits this, but not without the addition that the American “as a Marxist seemed to have become something out of the ordinary since the fall of the Wall and the end of history, or at least of communism, in the 1990s time fell.” Here, once again, it is not the bad conditions that are being criticized, but rather their correct materialist analysis is being declared outdated – while, to a certain extent the other way around, it is precisely the state of the capitalist world that continues to exist that proves every past plea for the necessity of overcoming it right.
Like many Marxists, Jameson was, as I said, a literary scholar, and as a Marxist his task was to formulate the study of literature as a critique of ideology. For Jameson’s own era, this means the criticism of postmodernism and its theoretical form, poststructuralism. He carried out this task and, above all, rejected the postmodern claim that there is no truth. In doing so, he also took aim at the construct of the “end of history” that the bourgeois elites had proclaimed after the collapse of the alternative system.
The literature professor from the American Midwest wrote perhaps his best-known work in 1991 and is entitled “Postmodernism. On the logic of culture in late capitalism«. This temporal information expresses an interesting optimism about the lifespan of this monstrous mode of production – precisely at the moment when its administrators had won their war of annihilation against socialism, which they had waged with bitter severity and at all levels for decades. An obituary in “Zeit” reassures in retrospect: “By the cultural logic of late capitalism he meant less the capitalist end point, but rather capitalism in his time.” Why neoliberalism, of all things, appeared to many theorists as the final stage of capitalism can be explained cannot be explored here. In any case, in his last publication during his lifetime, »Inventions of a Present. The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization”, Jameson refrains from this interpretation and instead speaks of “post-industrial capitalism”. How this term relates to the diagnosis formulated in the same book: “What’s new and special about the novel today… is that they try to write from the position of the collective – or at least register the crisis of the individual in taking this position.” , other materialists now have to find out.
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