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Getting out of HistoryAuthor(s): Hayden WhiteSource: Diacritics, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 2-13Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464939

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GETTING O U T O F HISTORY

HAYDEN WHITE"Aswe say of certain careers, history may lead to anything, provided you get out of it."- Levi-Strauss

Marxistsdo not studythe past in order to reconstructwhat happened in it,in the sense of determining what events occurred at specific times and places.They study historyin order to derive the laws of historicaldynamics. It is theselaws which preside over the systemic changes in social formations, and it isknowledge of these laws (rather han those of structure)which permitsMarxiststo predict changes likelyto occur in any given currentsocial system. Knowledgeof these laws of process makes it possible for us to distinguishbetween "realistic"and "delusory"programsfor effecting social change. Only insofar as we havesucceeded in accurately mapping what history has been down to the presentare we permittedto know what is possible and what impossible, in the way ofany social programin the present designed for the future.Marxismwas never intended to be merelya reactive social philosophy, butit can be innovative and constitutive of a new life for humankind only in theextent to which it has actually divined the laws of history and used them touncover the "plot"of the whole human drama which renders its surfacephenomena not only retrospectively understandable but prospectively mean-ingfulas well. Many modern Marxists,embarrassedby the similaritiesbetweenthis notion of historyand its religious, specificallyJudaeo-Christianprototypes,have tended to play down this "prophetic" spect and given themselves to thestudy of discrete, "concrete"historicaland social phenomena. This allows themto appear more "scientific,"after the manner of their counterparts in thebourgeois social sciences, but it also deprives their discourse of that moral col-orationwhich Marxderived from his Hegelian, utopian, and religiousforebears.Insofaras Marxist hought achieves the kindof respectabilitywhich comes withthe aping of methods or techniques of contemporary social science, justto thatextent Marxism oses in its power to inspirea visionarypolitics. Take the visionout of Marxismand all you will have left is a timid historicism of the kindfavored by liberalsand the kindof accommodationist politics which utilitariansidentify as the essence of politics itself.The visionary side of Marxism has been left to the cultivation of literaryartistsand students of their work in the 20th century. This conforms to the con-ditions of a largersplit within the human sciences in general between practi-tioners who wish to contrive a knowledge that will be therapeutic, accom-modationist, or adaptive in its effects and those who envision one that will betransformative,reconstitutive,radically revisionary n its aims. One can observethe crystallizationof this split condition in the debates that occurred withinMarxismin the 1920s and 1930s, in the thought of Luk~cs,Brecht, Benjamin,the members of the Frankfurtchool, and so on. The more Marxismattained to(or claimed) the authorityof a science, the more the stewardshipof its"vision-ary" ide fell to the literaryartistand critic. The more it succeeded in becoming

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the theoretical orthodoxy of a specific political practice, as in the Soviet Union, the more its"utopian"lement was progressivelysublimated into a vague commitment to "planning."Andthe more that vision gave way to planning, the more the literaryartist'sand critic'sefforts todefend the utopian moment in the Marxianlegacy became suspect, both on epistemic andpolitical grounds.For how can a vision, especially a vision of human liberation and redemption from"society"itself, ever be authorized either on practical or on scientific grounds? Even if"history"ttests to the fact that all men everywhere have always desired liberation from theircondition as merely social beings, it also attests to the fact that they have never been able tosatisfy that desire. Neither any practice actually established anywhere in history nor anyscience could ever direct us to what we ought to desire. Could Darwininstructthose turtleson the Galapagos to desire to be differentfrom what "naturalhistory"had made them? Thefact of humanity'sfailureeverywhere finally to redeem itself from the condition of socialityargues more for the delusory nature of this desire and for an accommodation to that condi-tion, after the manner of Freud'sargument in Civilizationand its Discontents, rather han forcontinued effortsto achieve what, in the nature of things, seems impossible.It is at this point that the authority of art and literature, considered not only asdocuments attestingto the realityof the desire for redemption, but as also providingjustifica-tion for the vision of its possible realization, enters into contention with practice, commonsense, and science alike. Insofar as art and literature,across whatever local differences intheir contents occasioned by their production in concrete historical conditions, not onlyinstantiate he human capacity for imagininga better world but also, in the universalityof theformsthat they utilize for the representationof vision itself,actually provide us with modelsor paradigmsof all creative productivityof a specifically human sort, to that extent art andliteratureclaim an authoritydifferentin kindfrom that claimed by both science and politics.It is the authorityof "culture"which is to be distinguishedfrom that of "society"precisely by

the universaltranslatability f the formsof its products. Among these forms and enjoying aspecial place amongst them by virtureof itspower to masterthe dispiritingeffects of the cor-rosive force of temporal processes is narrative.And it is to narrative,conceived as a "sociallysymbolic act"which by its form alone, ratherthan by the specific "contents"with which it isfilled in its variousconcrete actualizations, endows events with meaning, thatJameson con-signs the authorityto justifythe utopian moment in both human thought in general and inMarxism considered as the liberatingscience of that thought in particular.Jameson is a genuinely dialectical, and not merelyantithetical,critic. He seriouslyenter-tains the theories of other critics and not only those who in general share his own Marxistperspective. On the contrary, he is especially interested in the work of those criticswho arenon- or anti-Marxist,because he knows that any theory must be measured by its capacity,not to demolish its opponents, but to expropriatewhat is valid and insightful n itsstrongestopponents. In the long theoretical introduction to his book, entitled "On Interpretation:Literature s a Socially Symbolic Act,"we have what is surelythe most ambitiousattemptat asynthesis of critical conventions since Frye'sAnatomy of Criticism.Indeed, this introductioncan be viewed as an attempt to compose a Marxist version of Frye'sgreat work. As Marxclaimed to have done with Hegel, Jameson wishes to stand Frye"on his feet" and plant himfirmlyin the hardened clay of "history." Thegreatness of Frye," ameson remarks,"and theradical difference between his work and that of the great bulk of garden-variety mythcriticism lies in his willingness to raisethe issue of community and to draw basic, essentiallysocial consequences from the nature of religion as collective enterprise"[p. 69]. Jamesonsalutes Frye or remindingus that Marxisthermeneutics cannot do without the kindof atten-tion to "symbolism" nd the impulse to "libidinal ransformation"which informs his approachto the study of literature[p. 73]. And what Jameson calls "thepolitical unconscious"will berevealed in the course of his exposition as nothing less than the equivalent of the "vision"attained to on the level of what Frye, following the Church Fathers,called the "Anagogic"moment of literaryexpression [p. 74]. The kindof "social hermeneutic"(he also calls it"socialpoetics") envisaged by Jameson promises "to keep faith with its medievalprecursor... and ... restore a perspective in which the imageryof libidinalrevolutionandbodily transfigurationonce again becomes a figure for the perfected community. The unity

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of the body must once again prefigure he renewed organic identityof associative or collec-tive life, ratherthan, as for Frye,the reverse" p. 74].Now, it is in the nature of Jameson's project that, rather than merely asserting thesuperiorityof a Marxistmethod of reading literaryworks, he should take his stand on whathe calls simply "Marxist ritical insights" onceived as "somethinglike an ultimatesemanticprecondition for the intelligibilityof literaryand cultural texts"[p. 75]. This formulation isimportantfor anyone wishing to penetrate Jameson'scomplex argument, for it indicates hisintention to get beyond the conventional Marxist notion of the literary(or cultural)text asprimarilya "reflection" f structuresmore basic. The Marxistcritical"insights"lluded to pro-vide a way of comprehending how literary exts achieve a kindof cognitive authorityby vir-tue of their capacity to "workup"a certainknowledge (not merely a certain"intuition")f theconditions of their own production and render those conditions intelligible thereby.The text, it seems, is to be apprehended as a "symbolization" f what Jameson calls"three concentric frameworks" which function as "distinct semantic horizons." These"horizons" onsist of 1) political history, 2) the relevant social context, and 3) "historynowconceived in its vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production and the successionand destiny of the various social formations, from prehistoric life to whatever far futurehistory has in store for us"[p. 75]. When embedded in the firstframework, the literary extbecomes apprehendable as a "symbolicact" tself"political"n nature. At the second level, itis graspable as a manifestationof a general "ideologeme"of the social formation in which itarose or in which it is read- an "ideologeme"being"thesmallestintelligibleunit of the essen-tially collective discourses of social classes"[p. 76]. Then, finally,at the third level, the textand its ideologemes must be read together, in terms of what Jameson calls "theideology ofform, that is, the symbolic messages transmittedto us by the coexistence of various sign-systems which are themselves traces or anticipationsof modes of production"[p. 76].This notion of the way in which "Marxistnsights" an be used as "something like anultimatesemantic precondition for the intelligibilityof literaryand culturaltexts" urns,then,upon the conceptual efficacy of "theideology of form"which, for itspart,derives itsauthorityas an organon of interpretation rom itsquest for the text'sintelligibility not from itseffort to"explain" he text in any scientific sense or to "understand" t in the way of traditionalhermeneutics). Texts are rendered intelligible-or rather their intelligibilityis accountedfor- by their systematic insertion into a "history"hat is conceived to be not only sequencedbut also layered in such a way as to require different methods of analysis at the differentlevels on which it achieves the integrityof what is normally thought of as the "style" f a"period."Any analysis aspiringto more than an impressionisticreading, the authorityof whichresides in the "sensibility"f the readeralone, must confront the problem of causation. Butwhen itcomes to literaryworks, there are as many notions of "causality"s there are notionsof what "literature"onsists of. It is especially important orJamesonto consider the questionof "causality," ecause as a Marxistcritic, he cannot fail to confront the problem of the pro-duction of texts. The production of literary exts must be regardedas a process no more andno less mysterious than other processes of cultural production. And the production ofliterarytexts can be demystified only in the extent to which the "causes"operative in thatproductive process are indentified. Jameson surveys the various notions of causality(mechanical, expressive, and structural)hat critics have used, implicitlyor explicitly, in theirconsideration of the text viewed as an effect of causes more basic. While granting he appro-priatenessof these notions to any full account of a text's conditions of production, Jamesonregards hem as insufficient o a fullaccount insofaras they fail to ascend to the considerationof "history"tself as a cause. But"history"s here to be understood in a special sense, that is tosay, as an "absentcause"of effects in which we are permittedto espy the operations of themachinery moving the stage props of "history . . in its vastest sense of the sequence ofmodes of production and destiny of the various social formations, from prehistoric life towhatever far future historyhas in store for us."Thismachinery is comprised of nothing moreconsequent than Desire in conflict with Necessity.The confusion to the reader that is likelyto result fromthe effort to follow Jameson in hismany uses of the term"history" ill be more than justified.Inpartthe confusion is inevitable,given the diversityof meanings which the term "history"overs in currentusage. Itapplies to4


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and warmth and allowed to speak once more"makes sense only on the presuppositionthat"the human adventure is one" and that those artifacts have a place:within the unity of a single great collective story;only if, in however disguisedandsymbolic a form, they areseen assharinga single fundamental theme - forMarxism,the collective struggleto wrest a realm of Freedom froma realm of Necessity; only ifthey are graspedas vitalepisodes in a single vast unfinished plot: "Thehistoryof allhitherto existing society is the history of class struggle... ." It is in detecting thetraces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoringto the surface of the text therepressed and buried realityof this fundamental history, that the doctrine of thepolitical unconscious finds its function and its necessity."[pp. 19-20]Thus, it should be recognized that the cognitive authoritywhich Jameson consigns to"narrative"s a "socially symbolic act" derives from his conviction of the "narrativity"f thehistoricalprocess itself.The "master-narrative"f that process contrived by Marxderives itsclaim to realismand truthfulnessby virtueof itsadequacy to the representationof the struc-ture (orwhat amounts to the same thing, the "plot')of that process. And this circumstance ofthe adequacy of "narrative"o the representation of "history"provides Jameson with atouchstone for distinguishing, less between "ideology"and "truth"because all representa-tions of realityare"ideological"n nature),than between ideologies thatconduce to the effortto liberate man from "history" nd those that condemn him to an "eternal return"of its"alienatingnecessities." In those works of literature n which narrativitys either refused orbreaksdown, we are met with the traces of a despairwhich is not to be assigned to the moralweakness or lack of knowledge of their authors, but rather o the apperception of a shape ofsocial life grown old. The breakdown of narrativity n a culture, group, or social class is asymptom of its having entered into a state of crisis. For with any weakening of narrativizing

capacity, the group loses its power to locate itself in "history,"o come to grips with theNecessity that its past represents for it, and to imagine a creative, if only provisional,transcendence of its "fate."It is within the context of considerations such as these thatJameson attemptsto rethinkthe crucial analyticalconcept of ideology. This begins with his revision of the Althusserian-Lacanian notion of ideology, conceived not as "falseconsciousness" or vague "systemofvalues,"but ratheras an "imaginary elationship"o "transpersonal ealitiessuch as the socialstructureor the collective logic of history" p. 30]. Ideology is not, forJameson, a lie, decep-tion, or distortionof a perceivable reality,but ratheran attemptto come to termswith and totranscend the unbearable relationshipsof social life. 'To come to terms with"indicates theaccommodationist, the conventionally conceived "ideological"moment in every world-view, while "totranscend" ndicates its"utopian"moment. Unlike Mannheim and even sucholder Marxistsas LukAcsand Marcuse, Jameson does not work with the dichotomy of"science"on the one side and "ideology"on the other. Forhim any world-view which evencan appear minimally"realistic"must contain both of these elements, one that apprehendsclearly the divided natureof the human condition and another that seeks, more or less suc-cessfully, to imagine a world in which that divided condition will have been healed. Theimportantpoint is whether our transportation nto this imaginedworld returnsus to our ownreadyto do political battle for its transformationor ratherdeepens our alienation by addingthe sadness of "whatmight have been "to its dispiritingeffects.And this critical criterion holds for various versions of Marxism, no less than forliberalismand social democratism. Itis not only a matterof diviningthe fact that historyhas aplot; it is also a matterof what kind of plot you find in it. Infact, in a bold reversal,Jamesonturns the conventional critique of Marxism, namely, that it is only a kind of redemptivecreed, a secular religion, a "romantic" r "comic"myth, back on those who make it. "Theassociation of Marxismwith romance,"he writes,"doesnot discreditthe former so much as itexplains the persistence and vitalityof the latter,which Fryetakes to be the ultimate sourceand paradigmof all storytelling" p. 105]. Indeed, he suggests, it is only the shortsightednessof a bourgeois-secularist perspective which fails to recognize the validity of the sociallyliberating impulse of both romance and the myths of the redemptive religions since timeimmemorial. If Marxismlooks, sounds, and feels like a traditionalreligion, it is because it6


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shares the desire for redemption that motivates the latter,even if it translatesthis desire intosocial terms and locates it in the domain of historyas its proper field of possible cathexes.And in his conclusion, in which he meditates on the work of Benjamin, Bloch, andDurkheim, he suggests that far from negating religious ideals, Marxismdiscloses their trueground and points us to the only place in creation where they can be actualized, i.e., in a"history"hat has to be hated as much as comprehended if we are to "escape" rom it.At the same time, Marxism must be recognized for the "historicism"t is and in itsownturn "historicized"f we are to escape the limitationsof its original, nineteenth-century for-mulation.To "historicize"means to show the extent to which any ideal, Marxistof otherwise,must come to terms with the sedimented residues of past"formsof life"which went into anygiven formulationof its principles. Foucault remarkssomewhere that Marxism swims in thenineteenth century like a fish in water, suggestingthereby that itsauthorityas a discourse isweakened in the extent to which our age is no longer that of Marx.Jameson's ack is to grantthat Marxismcan never be a finished creed, but always a system in evolution, the vitalityofwhich consists of itscapacity to "narrativize"tsown development, to "situate"tssuccessiveincarnationswithin the context of theirformulations,and to uncover the "plot"n which theyplay their partsand contribute to the articulationof their unifying"theme."Butif I read him aright,he is suggestingthat the storyof the development of Marxism,ifcorrectly read, reveals two scandals which must be directly confronted and set right.Onehas to do with the ill-treatment by "scientific" or rather "scientistic') Marxists of theiranarchico-utopiancomrades. The other is the incapacityof conventional or orthodox Marx-ism to deal with what Jameson calls the "paradox" f art. Jameson's allusions to "libidinalrevolution"and "bodily transformation" ndicate his affinities with the anarchist wing ofnineteenth-century Marxism,although this brandof utopianismhas been brought up to datein the light of post-Freudiantheories of the sort promoted by N. O. Brown and Marcuse.These theories appear in the guise of Lacanian-Deleuzean categories in the present work.Not that Jameson is an uncriticaladmirerof the current celebration of "leschizo." His rule,good historicistthat he is, is "contextualize, always contextualize";and he sees the impor-tance of Deleuze's twist on Lacan as residing in the radical critique which it offers to adomesticating psychoanalytical interpretive practice. He wants to justify interpretationagainst those who, in a furyof Schopenhauerian pessimism, want to throw out bathwater,baby, and bathtub alike. The "furioso" ote is not lacking in Jameson'sown mental set, but itis tempered by an old-fashioned respect for manual labor which channels his fury into thekind of anarchism that one associates with the older guild traditionof the nineteenth cen-tury.The scandal in Marxismwhich is occasioned by its notion of the "paradoxof art" sanother matter. This paradox consists of nothing more than the fact that the artwork both"reflects" he conditions of the time and place of its production and is therefore to beregarded as purely "timebound"as to its "content,"on the one side, while it will manifestlytranscend those conditions and speak meaningfullyto the problems and concerns of otherages, times and places, on the other side, therby escaping the kind of "determinism"whichMarxism must assign to it. How is this possible?

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It is possible, Jameson argues, because historical epochs are not monolithically inte-gratedsocial formationsbut, on the contrary,complex overlaysof different modes of produc-tion which serve as the bases of different social groups and classes and, consequently, oftheir world-views. It is because there are a number of differentmodes of production in anygiven historicalepoch that differentclasses can exist in a varietyof kinds of antagonismwithone another. This accounts for the absence of a fundamental schism in social life, in whichthe social field polarizes into opposed camps, in all periodsof historyexcept forthe principalaxial ones, e.g. the late Classical period, the late Medieval period, and our own, lateCapitalist period. Even in such crisis periods, however, older modes of production are lesswiped out than simply relegatedto an inferiorposition in the hierarchyof modes of produc-tion. Inany event, the forms of consciousness of older modes of production, e.g., the slaveand feudal, continue to persistwithin the later one of capitalism,and thisgives to these formsof consciousness an aspect of "realism" nsofar as they provide codes adequate to therepresentationsof "conflicts"hat are experienced as "contradictions"nherent in social life ingeneral. Insofaras a given literarywork, produced under the conditions of a mode of pro-duction still present in a much laterage, graspsa kind of social contradiction as its subject-matter and goes on to projecta vision of a condition in which this mode of contradiction hasbeen transcended, in that extent a work of art remains relevant to any social formationsimilarly"contra-dicted."The literaryclassic does not appeal to laterages by virtueof sometimeless "wisdom"of the sort that can be distilled into a "syntopicon"or digests of the hun-dred "greatbooks." What the classic achieves is an instantiationof the human capacity toendow lived contradictions with intimations of their possible transcendence. The classicdoes this by givingthe idealityof formto what otherwise would be a chaotic condition mademore unbearable by the awareness, constantlysuppressed, thatthis condition is a productofonly human contrivance.Among the variousform-givingdevices available to the imagination n this transcenden-talizing work, narrativeenjoys a privileged position. It is privileged because it permits arepresentationof both synchrony and diachrony, of structuralcontinuities, on the one side,and of the processes by which those continuities are dissolved and reconstitutedin the kindof meaning-production met with in such forms of narrativeas the novel, on the other. Nar-rativitynot only represents but justifies, by virtue of its universality,a dream of how idealcommunity might be achieved. Not exactly a dream, rathermore of a daydream, a wish-ful-filling fantasy which, like all such fantasies, is grounded in the real conditions of thedreamer'slife but goes beyond these, to the imaginingof how, in spite of these conditions,things might be otherwise. Moreover, in its purely formal properties, the dialectical move-ment by which a unity of plot is imposed upon the superficialchaos of story-elements, nar-rativeserves as a paradigmof the kind of social movement by which a unityof meaning canbe imposed upon the chaos of history.This is the burden of The Political Unconscious con-ceived as a studyof "Narrative s a SociallySymbolic Act."Inmany respects, the burden fallson the ontologically significantstatus given to "narrativity"tself. This is why the fate of nar-rative in the modern novel is presented as an evidence of the decline of the culture whichproduced it. Inthis book, the thesis outlined in an early articleby Jameson, "Metacommen-tai, ," which won a prize from the Modern LanguageAssociation some ten years ago, isfleshed out ana aocumented with a weight of evidence hard to deny.Jameson is preeminently concerned with the current cultural moment, but his wholeenterprisedepends on his effortto rethinkthe cultural moment just preceding our own, theperiod of the triumphand decline of "realism,"xtending fromthe French Revolutionto justbefore World War I.Thisperiod marksthe transitionto high capitalismin the domain of pro-duction and to modernism in literature,art,and thought. His consideration of what we usedto call the phases of Romanticism,Realism,and Naturalism n modern literaturerequiresthatwe view these stylisticchanges as phases in the rise and entrance into crisis of the bourgeoisworld-view. He plots this process as a movement in which the class antagonisms and con-tradictions of social life in the capitalist age are, first,apprehended (Romanticism); econdly,affirmed as a "referent"of an objective vision of the world (Realism); and, thirdly,systematicallyrepressed or sublimated by a combination of what he calls "metaphysics" nd"melodrama"Naturalism).Inthis last phase, we witness the cultivationof the very "ressenti-ment" that the modern novel wished to account for. Needless to say, "modernism," he8


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fourth phase of this process, the phase in which we now live, is that in which this "ressenti-ment"reappears as the "reality"hat can no longer be denied. This modernist phase is notdealt with in the current book, having been accounted for in his study of Wyndham Lewis,Fables of Aggression,published in 1979, a work subtitled:"TheModernist as Fascist."I do not know why the book on Lewis, originallyconceived as a part of The PoliticalUnconscious, was published separately. Itmay have something to do with the ambivalencewhich any Marxistmust feel about modernism. Afterall, modernism has to appear as deca-dent, the form in literature and art which reflects the crisis into which late capitalism hasentered (modernismas literary ascism, etc.). At the same time, as a historicalphenomenon,modernism must be presumed to carry within itself the potentialities for its owntranscendence, especially since, in Jameson'sreformulationof the Base-Superstructuralela-tionship, culture is to be viewed less as a reflectionof the modes of productionthan as simplyanother aspect of these modes. InJameson'sown emplotment of modern Western literaturefrom Romanticism to the present, modernism appears as the final form of a problematicwhich begins with Romanticism and achieves its own ironic reversal and decompositionthrough a working out of its potentialities across the movements conventionally called"realism"and "naturalism."Modernism thus envisaged is nothing but this reversal anddecomposition. [See the last chapter of Fables of Aggression, California, 1979, esp. pp.171-77.] The penultimate chapter of The Political Unconscious, entitled "Romance andReification," nds with the words:

The perfected poetic apparatusof high modernism represses Historyjust as suc-cessfully as the perfected narrative apparatus of high realism did the randomheterogeneity of the as yet uncentered subject. At thatpoint, however, the political,no longer visiblein the high modernisttexts,any more than in the everydayworld ofappearance of bourgeois life, and relentlesslydriven undergroundby accumulatedreification,has at last become a genuine Unconscious. [p. 280]

Since modernism is the end of a story which begins with Romanticism,the conceptualiza-tion of the latter is of crucial importance for the understandingof the "plot"which this storydescribes. It is, in Jameson'saccount, in Romanticismthat, for the firsttime, the contradic-tions (and not merely the conflicts) between feudal and capitalist modes of production areclearly apprehended and the price that will have to be paid for the triumphof the latter irstdimly perceived. These contradictions are, as it were, sublimated and subjected to artistic"working hrough" n the peculiar hesitancies, exhilarations and depressions, combinationsof Promethean bombast and Weltschmerz, of Romanticism. The dimensions of thisschismatic condition are manifested in the combination of archaic longing for an older,seemingly richer and more humane way of life nostalgically recuperated in idealized imagesof the Middle Ages, on the one hand, and the genuinely utopian, futuristic,and science-fictional kinds of visionary literatureproduced by that movement, on the other.The novel, with its heavy baggage of reconfiscatedgenres, its license to experiment withdifferent modes of articulation,its authorization to fiddle with conventional notions of plot,character, and point of view, appears especially well-suited to the needs of a schizophrenicconsciousness which will, over the course of the 19th century, be symbolicallyelaborated-from Stendhal, Manzoni, and Austin, through Balzac, Flaubert, and Dickens, down toGissing, Zola, Dreiser, and Conrad- and the "realism"which marksthem all will be finallyplayed out. This prepares the way for the advent of modernism, in which Romanticistnotions, now revived as an even more sublimated longing for meaning and coherency inhuman affairs,enjoy a second life as elements of a paradigmof what culturalcreativitycanaspire to amongst both writers and critics alike. Thissublimated romaticism is the true "con-tent" of those forms of exacerbated subjectivitywhich appear in modernist literatureas arejectionof Historyand in modernist criticism as a denial that meaning is"determinable,"notonly for texts but also and especially for human consciousness in general.Jameson's explication of this "plot"of 19th-century cultural history and its relation tosocial reality s itself elaborated across a systematic analysisof works by three writers:Balzac,Gissing, and Conrad, who are treated as emblemata of the stages of classical realism,naturalism,and proto-modernismrespectively. Jameson does not claim that his treatment ofdiacritics / fall 1982 9


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these writers constitutes a true and proper history of 19th-century literature or even anoutline of such a history. They are used to illustrateand substantiatea criticalstance orprisede conscience of the literaryartifactin its function as a social document. He does not evenclaim that his book should be taken as providinga "method"or readingall novels, althoughhe accords to the novel a crucial role for the understandingof the bourgeois writer'sattemptsto deal with and transcend the condition of "ressentiment"which he regards as the"ideologeme"or "classfantasy"of the bourgeois in general [p. 88].What interestshim about the novel is the fact that, in his (Bakhtinian) stimation, it usesolder genres as its "raw material" very bit as much as it uses the detritus of "everyday ife"which is supposed to be its principalsubject-matter [p. 151]. Because the novel enjoys thefreedom which a free mixture of generic conventions provides, it is ideally suited to reflectthe numerous "codes" orendowing events with meaning which arise from the various socialclasses' different functions in the multiplemodes of production present in every age or socialformation. Because the novel uses a host of older generic conventions for its representationof a realitythat is apprehended as multiple, complex, internallyantagonistic, historical,andultimatelythreateningto our humanity, it provides the ideal instrumentfor the examinationof what Jameson calls "the ideology of form."The use that Jameson makes of this conceptsignals his acceptance of the Formalistheresyappropriatelyrevisedfor Marxistpurposes. It isthe form of the literarywork that constitutes its ideology, not itsputative contents, whetherconceived &a Auerbach as the activitiesof a given class or as certaineveryday phenomenaformerly excluded from representation in "serious" iterature. Where he differs from mostFormalists nd Structuralistss in his conviction that the form of the literarywork is where notonly technical writing problems are worked out, but also specifically political ones. Whatmodern Western literatureachieves, in the course of itsdevelopment from Romanticismon,is a sublimationof "ressentiment,"ts endowment with a form so perfect as to make of it anobject of Desire. The modernistwriter not only writes about or reflects"ressentiment," e (orshe) positively wills it, seeks it, and celebrates it; and does so moreover by drainingeveryrepresentation of life of any concrete content whatsoever. This is what the celebration of"form"n modern culture signals. This celebration in not only a political act, it is the formwhich politics assumes in everyday life under the conditions of late capitalism.This is not the place to recapitulatethe many insightsinto the work of the writers dealtwith by Jameson. His are "strong" eadings, not made easier to follow by the Greimasianapparatuswhich he uses to earn them. Nor is it the place to subject these readingsto anykind of "empirical"est. In spite of the fact that Jameson indicates his willingness to let histheory stand or fall on its capacity to generate insights into the structuresof literaryworks,any objection to a given readingwould simply indicate the presence of an alternativetheoryor presuppose a readingof the text inquestion which was simply more "valid"hanJameson'saccount of it. On the matter of Jameson'sreadingsof specific texts, I will simply reiteratearemarkmade to me once by an eminent anti-Marxist ritic who said that he had never readanything by Jameson that was not illuminative of the texts under discussion. Suffice it to say,then, that the readings of Manzoni, Balzac, Gissing, Conrad, Dreiser, and so forth are wellworth the effort it takes to assimilate the theory which enables them as a price of admission.10


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As for the theory itself,that is another matter. Not everyone feels the need for a theory,especially a theory of literature,and this is true even of some ethical critics who wish torelate literature o its social contexts and to write its "history."And for such critics as these,Jameson'swork will be as alienatingas the alienation which his theory wishes to account for.Butan ethical critic who thinksthat"history"s comprised of a body of factsthat are easier tounderstand than the literarytexts which he or she wishes to insert into this "history," nwhatever manner, is proceeding under a delusion. Whatever one maythink of Marxismas asocial philosophy, it has succeeded in placing the concept of "history"nherited from theearly 19th century and ensconced as an orthodoxy of belief amongst professional,academichistorians under question. It is not a matter of appealing to history as a way of decidingbetween conflicting interpretationsof a literary ext, as if this historywere a seamless weband told only one story which could be invoked as a way of defining what is only "fictive"and what is"real"n a given literaryrepresentationof a form of life. ForJameson is surely rightwhen he arguesthat ethical criticism must choose between a version of historywhich makessense in its totalityas a universal human experience and one which makes sense only withrespect to finite partsof that totality.Ifone is going to "goto history,"one had better have an address in mind, rather han gowandering around the streets of the past like a flaneur. Historicalflaneurismeis undeniablyenjoyable, but the historywhich we are living today is no place for tourists. Ifyou are goingto "goto history," ou had better have a clear idea of which historyyou are going to, and youhad better have a prettygood notion of whether the one you are going to is hospitableto thevalues you carry into it. This is the function of theory in general, that is to say, to providejustificationof a stance vis-a-visthe materialsbeing dealt with that can render it plausible.Indeed, the function of theory is to justify a notion of plausibility itself. Without such ajustification,criticism especially is left with nothing but "common sense"to fall back on.In literary heory in particular, he aim is to define- for primarilyheuristicpurposes andnot as a matter of constitutingsome Platonicabsolute-what will be permittedto count as aspecifically literarywork and what kinds of relationshipsthe work thus defined can be con-ceived to bear to other kindsof culturalartifacts,on the one side, and to whatever passes fora non-culturalartifact,on the other. At this level of inquiry, it can be seen how farJamesonhas rejected the currently fashionable Structuralist and Post-Structuralist notion of"textuality"which has been extended to cover every aspect of culture. In this respect,Jameson continues to honor the concept of the literaryartifactas a "work" atherthan as a"text."The notion of "text"has served to authorize a manner of readingwhich celebrates the"undecidability" f the literaryartifactand, by extension, all culturalartifacts.The "closure"owhich the 19th-centurynovel, in itsclassical form, aspiredis not regardedbyJameson, as it isfor a certain current convention of interpretation,as prima facie evidence of its contamina-tion by an idealizing and therefore duplicitous (bourgeois) ideology. The aspiration toclosure may be what characterizes narrative, in the same way that it characterizes every"constative" entence, but this aspiration is not to be written off as another evidence of adominant class's desire to hide its privileges and to feed the masses with the opiate ofteleology. And it is certainly not to be written off as the "ideological"alternative to the gen-uinely "utopian"vision supposedly reflected in the more "open"form of a hypostatized(lyrical)"poetry"after he manner of JuliaKristeva n "TheNovel as Polylogue"and the laterBarthes).ForJameson, the closure to which every narrativeaspires is justified, as it were,"ontologically"nsofar as it conforms to a vision of a humanity finally reconciled with natureand with itself, of a society finallydelivered into community which both traditionalreligionand the Marxist"master-narrative"f historyenvision as a moral necessity.Itwas this largervision of historyas a storyof redemption that got lost to Marxistswhofailed to win power in the West and who, havingwon it in the Soviet Union, forgot about it.The substitution of pragmatic or reformistprograms for the revolutionary vision of Marxseemed justified by the work of Marxisthistorians hemselves who, in theircontemplation ofthe "failure" f every concrete programof revolutionarytransformation, ended to produce"visionsof historicalNecessity ... in the form of the inexorable logic involved in the deter-minate failure of all revolutions that have taken place in human history . ."[p. 101-102].Such a "realistic" otion of historicalrealityis fullyjustifiedon the basis of the "facts" lone,but inJameson'sview, such a perspective only tells us what it is that hurtsus, not how to curediacritics / fall 1982 11


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/V

:VA C02uit or heal the pain. This "cure" s not so much given by art as the search for it is authorizedtherein. Precisely because all art is ideology, refined, fully elaborated, worked out, asGoldmann used to say, to the "limitsof possibility,"t revealsthe utopian impulse inherent inculture itself. And this is as true of fascist art as it is of liberal,conservative, and radicalart,because: "allclass consciousness .... all ideology in the strongestsense, includingthe mostexclusive forms of ruling-classconsciousness justas much as that of opposition or oppressedclasses- is in its very nature Utopian"[p. 289].Consequently, for Jameson, "Marxistanalysis of culture, .... must.., .seek, throughand beyond a demonstration of the instrumentalfunction of a given culturalobject, to pro-ject its simultaneously Utopian power as the symbolic affirmationof a specific historicalandclass form of collective unity" [p. 291]. If, then, Jameson's work indicts any "positivehermeneutic"which, like Frye's,"relaxesinto the religious or theological, the edifying andthe moralistic,"nsofaras "it s not informed by a sense of the class dynamics of social lifeandcultural production" p. 292], it also indictsa "Marxiannegative hermeneutics'"which "fullyjustifies complaints about the 'mechanical'or purely instrumental nature of certain Marxiancultural analyses . . ."[p. 291]. If it were ever to happen that, in culturalanalysis in general,"theopposition of the ideological to the Utopian, or the functional-instrumental o the col-lective" were transcended, we could be sure that we were on the verge "the end of whatMarxcalls prehistory" p. 293]. Need it be said that, in The PoliticalUnconscious, Jamesonpurportsto have laid the basis for such a theoretical transcendence?If an "empirical"est of Jameson'stheory is not called of on this occasion, neither is acritical reading of it which, from within a certitude of its own adequacy, would simply"unpack"he congeries of presuppositionsthat inform it. Icould, forexample, readJameson'saccount of the career of the 19th-centurynovel, with its four-stagedevelopment, as merelyanother rehearsalof the Marxian our-stagedialectic which all significantsocial and culturalprocesses undergo. And Icould do a similar ob on his analysisof the four kindsof causalitywhich he thinksto be at work in the production of the literaywork. Butthiswould be only tomake manifestthe commitment to Marxist"dialectics"which Jameson openly admits to. It isJameson'sown refinements on the use of this dilectic and his identificationof it with narrativein general- and especially with the Marxist"master-narrative"f world history that are atissue.It is significant, I think, that when, in his introduction, Jameson is arguingfor the ade-quacy of the Marxist"master-narrative"o account for the "essentialmysteryof the culturalpast,"he lapses into the conditional mood: ". . . only if the human adventure is one . . ."[p.19]. In the end, he must leave it to individual judgment to decide whether the Marxist"master-narrative"f world history is the best story that can be told about it. We are left inmuch the same situation as Orestes in Sartre'sThe Flies or Hugo at the end of DirtyHands,that is to say, with the option of choosing either the Marxiststory or not, but stillchoosingeven by our refusal to choose. LikeSartre,Jameson seems to think that a life makes senseonly insofar as it is worked up into a story, this story embedded in another storyof greater,transpersonal scope, and this in another, and so on. This may well be the case from a con-ventional psychoanalytical perspective, and even from the perspective of common sense.But the crucial problem, from the perspective of political struggle, is not whose story is the12


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best or truest, but who has the power to make his story stick as the one that others willchoose to live by or in. Itmay well be that the decline of narrativereflects, less a condition ofdecadence than a sickness unto death with the stories that representativesof officialcultureare always invokingto justifythe sacrificesand sufferingsof the citizenry. One alternative to"collective unity" s anarchy, and this alternative becomes more attractiveas an ideal, themore "collective unity"is enforced upon us by a combination of "master-narratives"ndinstrumentsof control backed by weapons.This raises an even more crucial theoretical problem, namely, that of Jameson's iden-tificationof the "anagogic" imension of art with a "meaning"hat is specifically "political."Heis no doubt right n arguingthat modern highculture reflects a "repression"f "politics," ut itmay well be that the politics it has repressed is one that is no longer possible. I mean ofcourse politics in the classical formulation,the lastvestige of which is to be observed in theworkings of the parliamentaryregimes of the 19th century, which featured "representative"parties, debate, a willingness to abide by the rules of the game, faith in the workings of a"hidden hand" that would mysteriously conduce to the "greatestgood for the greatestnumber"over the long run, and so forth. On the face of it, our age has witnessed a transfor-mation of what, since the Renaissance, was conceived as politics, a circumstance whichfascism affirmsas a condition of its possibilityand old-fashioned humanists lament as thecause of our discontents. The death of this politics is surely of a piece with the death of acultural endowment which takes the "timelessness" f the "classics" or granted. At the veryend of his book, Jameson recalls Benjamin's"identificationof culture and barbarism"n "TheTheses on the Philosophy of History."Benjaminreminds us of the extent to which even "thegreatest cultural monuments"are "stainedwith the guilt not merely of culture in particularbut of Historyitself as one long nightmare" p. 299]. And this reminder, Jameson says, is asalutary"rebuke" nd "corrective"o "thedoctrine of the politicalunconscious"itself. It recallsus to consciousness of the extent to which "within he symbolic power of artand culture thewill to domination perseveres intact."And if this is true of "artand culture," s it not true also of those philosophies of art andculture, of which the Marxist"master-narrative"s one? Is it not possibly true of "narrative"itself?Is it not possible that the doctrine of "History,"o arduouslycultivated by the Westerntradition of thought since the Greeks as an instrument for releasing human consciousnessfrom the contraintsof the Archaic age, is readyfor retirementalong with the "politics"hat ithelped to enable? And could not the death of "History," olitics, and narrativeall be aspectsof another great transformation,similarin scope and effect to that which marked the breakwith Archaicism begun by the Greeks?Marxthought that the communist revolution wouldrelease humankind from the conditions of pseudo-historical existence and usher in a gen-uinely historicalone. The problem may be not how to get into history,but how to get out ofit. And in this respect, modernism in the arts may be less a regressionto a pseudo-mythiccondition of consciousness than an impulse to get beyond the myth-historydistinction,which has served as the theoretical basis for a politics that has outlived its usefulness, andinto a post-political age insofaras "politics"s conceived in its 19th-century incarnations.

diacritics / fall 1982 13

h. white_getting out of history

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