we are cannibals all fredric jameson on

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We are cannibals, all: Fredric Jameson on colonialism and experienceAvram Alpert

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We are cannibals, all: Fredric Jamesonon colonialism and experience

AVRAM ALPERT

‘All third world texts are necessarily . . . national allegories.’1 It was with thissentence, published now more than twenty years ago, that Fredric Jamesonbecame, practically overnight, one of the most criticized figures in postcolonialliterary studies. The torrent of critiques started with Aijaz Ahmad’s nowequally famous response, and continued up through the late 1990s in GayatriSpivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason. What gave Jameson the right, theyasked, to so generally theorize the Third World? What deep colonialist biasespermeated the text? And what was this strange insistence on nationalismanyway?

Sometime in the past five years or so, however, the tone shifted. After over adecade of diatribes, a series of ‘qualified defences’ began to appear. Theyclaimed that Jameson’s essay was more tongue-in-cheek than Ahmad or othershad allowed. Moreover, they suggested, the ideas of the essay might be accurateand true*perhaps Third World writers really do write in the form of nationalallegories. And perhaps, just as crucially, the national allegory itself was muchmore complicated than nationalism, and did in fact offer a suggestive model forliterature the world over.2

It is difficult to engage the essay ‘Third-World Literature in the Era ofMultinational Capitalism’ without going through these recriminations andqualified defences that it has continued to provoke. These responses havespoken to the heart of Jameson’s essay and the political project surrounding. Sothen it is not just difficult, indeed it is politically suspect, to avoid any of thesequestions. I will suggest here, however, that it is worthwhile to at least bracketthis political question in order to ask if there was something else happening inthat essay, something just as important as its ‘sweeping hypothesis’ ortheorization of the national allegory. Indeed, it will be my contention in thisessay that national allegory is in fact the superstructural term that relates to acrucial substructural problem: the question of how we experience the world inthe present day and the methodology for shifting that form of experience. Inlooking at this feature of Jameson’s essay within the context of his other work, Ithink we can better understand why his arguments still elicit both rancour andesteem. As we shall see, his theory of experience is as rich and sophisticated as itis fraught with colonial legacies.

In the original foray, critics attacked Jameson’s colonialist bias and hisinsistence on nationalism, while recent essays defending Jameson have gonethrough his work on Wyndham Lewis to recover the notion of the national

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allegory.3 This is, I think, insufficient, not only because national allegory is notthe only crucial term in the essay, but also because it fails to understand thedeep situatedness of the ‘Third World’ essay within Jameson’s entire oeuvre andnot just his work on Lewis. Moreover, the term experience, as Martin Jay haspersuasively shown, is absolutely central to intellectual life in the past 150years.4 This is certainly evident, though rarely noticed, in Jameson’s own work.

Indeed, the term experience plays a clear role in how Jameson frames theargument of his now infamous essay. Recall that Jameson begins in his typicalcritical fashion: to keep us on guard from our ‘natural responses’ to texts. Theimmediate response he sets out to critique is that ‘the third-world novel will notoffer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce’.5 Jameson, intervening in contem-porary debates about the canon, wants to suggest that if this is the case, it is notso because Third World novels are inferior, but rather because First Worldersand Third Worlders have two radically different sensibilities when it comes tothe novel.

Jameson then sees the crux of this split emanating from two differentexperiences*for the Third World, this is having ‘suffered the experience ofcolonialism and imperialism’.6 For the First World it is a different sort ofrupture in experience: ‘We have been trained in a deep cultural conviction thatthe lived experience of our private existences is somehow incommensurablewith the abstractions of economic science and political dynamics.’7 Jamesonsees this as a dialectical relationship*the First World loses its sense of a totalexperience once it enters imperial capitalism (the means of production are nolonger immediately experienceable in the metropole), and the Third World,receiving the displaced mode of production from the First, is forced to reckonwith the effects of politics in its most intimate spaces.8 This, then, is hisexplanation for why we do not appreciate Third World texts the way weappreciate Joyce or Proust: it is not because of some defect in the text, butrather because we cannot grasp this other type of experience.

This is the purportedly progressive part of Jameson’s essay*the idea that wemust suspend our given reactions and seek to understand the experiences ofothers with fresh eyes. Critics of the essay had nothing against this notion per se,but many remained sceptical of the conclusions about this ‘other experience’which Jameson came to. Foremost among them, of course, was Aijaz Ahmad in‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘‘National Allegory’’’. Ahmadpicked apart Jameson’s essay point by point, from the notion of a ‘cognitiveaesthetics’ to Jameson’s betrayal of Marxism through his nationalist sentimentsto questioning Jameson’s knowledge of Third World texts in general. Mostimportant for my argument, Ahmad also questions Jameson’s use of the termexperience.

Ahmad first recognizes the position that I have outlined above*namely, theidea that First World texts are marked by the sundering of the social and thepsychic, a sundering which is supposedly sutured in the Third World text. Herightly concludes that this binary opposition is absurd, and is only possible ifone defines the First and Third Worlds as having ‘singular identity[ies] of‘‘experience’’’,9 an idea which he spends most of the essay debunking.

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Ahmad continues this line of critique by looking at a passage on Lukacs fromMarxism and Form where Jameson traces the split between private and publicto the rise of industrial capitalism. Ahmad sees this as the backgroundto Jameson’s writings on experience in the Third World essay: ‘Clearly, then,what was once theorised as a difference between the pre-industrial andthe industrialised societies (the unity of the public and the private in one, theseparation of the two in the other) is now transposed as a difference between thefirst and third worlds.’10 Ahmad’s point that the Third World is a romanticizedsite just like the pre-industrial world was is well taken. The idea that Jamesonhas simply transposed this romanticism, however, does not quite work. Afterall, it is precisely because of the changes in the structure of industrial capitalismthat the Third World has the experience it does. In other words, Ahmad lets usthink that perhaps Jameson believes the Third World is in the same condition asthe pre-industrial, but this is far from the case. Instead, Jameson has a rathercomplex notion of the relationship between the public and private incontemporary writing, a relationship which he says is mediated by a particularstyle of allegory.

In the ‘Third World’ essay, Jameson makes it explicit that his notion ofallegory has nothing to do with the ‘traditional conception’ of an allegory as asymbolic equivalence between fiction and reality. Rather, he writes, ‘theallegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks andheterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than thehomogenous representation of the symbol’.11 In other words, a literaryallegory of class relations can no longer simply map the relationship betweenthe public and the private in a one-to-one manner; rather it must useincreasingly variegated narrative strategies, such as those which Jamesonrecognizes in the work of Lu Xun and Sembene Ousmane.

This idea of a complex relationship between allegory and experience has aparticular muse for Jameson, another thinker who took the notion ofexperience very seriously: Walter Benjamin.12 Jameson’s ideas here areparticularly influenced by Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’, which he callsBenjamin’s ‘masterpiece’ in Marxism and Form.13 Later, in the 1984 afterwordto his first work, Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Jameson notes that ‘the basicpropositions of this study turned around the question of narrative . . . thepossibility of storytelling, and the kinds of experience*social and existential*structurally available in a given social formation’.14 Jameson thus laments thathe had limited access at the time of writing Sartre to thinkers like Adorno andBenjamin. After all, this relationship of storytelling to experience was aprimary theme of Benjamin’s own work.

This classic essay of Benjamin on storytelling became a significantprecursor for Jameson’s own reading of Third World literature. Recall thatBenjamin had framed his remarks on storytelling by writing of the loss ofpositive experience in the modern era: ‘For never [before] has experience beencontradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare,economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare,moral experience by those in power.’15

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Benjamin opposed this world of fractured experience to the world of Leskov,the storyteller: whereas the contemporary world had these fragmentedexperiences, the lost world of the storyteller was whole. Thus Benjamin likenedthe storyteller to the craftsman as someone who could assemble the parts of hislife into a whole: ‘his very task [is] to fashion the raw material of experience, hisown and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way . . . His gift is theability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to tell his entire life.’16 We seehere the relationship of the part to the whole, the organicity that Ahmad notes.But although Benjamin suggested that the work of storytelling could redeemsuch loss, he still insisted that the loss of storytelling itself was a symptom of theera.

Since this was the case, Benjamin’s solution, as we know from his essays onBaudelaire and cinema, was not a simple return to the lost art of storytelling.He sought, rather, to revolutionize the forms of experience as best he could.Relating the part to the whole was the capacity of the storyteller, and it issomething we should remember, but it is not something we need necessarilyembody. As Benjamin puts it elsewhere, ‘Commemoration is the complementto experience . . . commemoration [comes] from the dead occurrences of thepast which are euphemistically known as experience.’17 Experience of the part�whole relation, then, for Benjamin, is dead. We can remember it, we canperiodically ‘seize’ it as he says in the ‘Theses’, but the modern world willdemand much more elaborate strategies than Leskov’s. One such strategy,which Jameson has been foremost in bringing our attention to, is that ofallegory. Summarizing Benjamin, he writes, ‘Allegory is . . . the privileged modeof our own life in time, a clumsy deciphering of meaning from moment tomoment, the painful attempt to restore a continuity to heterogeneous,disconnected instants.’18 Once again, then, we can see that the ‘nationalallegory’ is not about a return to an older form of experience, but the inventionof a new form of writing to deal specifically with the loss of such a form.

There is one more salient point here, which is that Benjamin has himself tolda story*the story of the disintegration of storytelling (the part) in relation tothe rise of the novel, World War I, industrial capitalism, and so forth (thewhole). Notice, then, the strange form he has used*this new form of criticismwhich attempts to show its own conditions of impossibility. What Benjaminseeks thus is not a return, but to make possible what he calls ‘counsel’: ‘After all,counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning thecontinuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one wouldfirst have to be able to tell the story.’19 Benjamin offers such an allegory for histimes, and one redemptive way to read Jameson is to say that he is doingsomething similar in the Third World essay. His story is, like any story, a sort offiction (‘all . . . necessarily . . .’), but it is a fiction directed to the specific end ofcounsel. To the question of whether or not Jameson has accurately described‘Third World literature’ is thus added another: whether or not the story he hastold about it will provide a form of counsel.20

In Marxism and Form, Jameson argues that there is a particular style ofwriting that will give good counsel, a style which he names ‘dialecticalcriticism’. Cultural critique for Jameson becomes ‘first and foremost . . . a

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form . . . [I]t always involves the jumping of a spark between two poles, thecoming into contact of two unequal terms, of two apparently unrelated formsof being.’21 For Jameson these two poles are the individual work and the socialworld in which the work takes place*what he calls the ‘ontological ground’.22

We can see here the essential form of the Third World essay: it shows how twoforms of writing which appear at first unrelated are intimately connectedthrough the ‘ontological ground’ of changes in the structure of capitalismwhich result in imperialism. In other words, the First World experience istrapped in private matters because its real material conditions lie elsewhere,while Third World experience is necessarily political because it must react tothis imposition of material conditions from the First World. It is this relationthat the essay seeks to give a voice to, and, in so doing, to tell us a story thatmight help re-orient such an uneven development.

The topic of the place of experience and this style of criticism within theThird World essay is further underscored by the presence of one of Jameson’spreferred methods of dialectical criticism*what he will later come to callcognitive mapping. This is a term he will not use until 1983, but a sense of itappears as early as Marxism and Form with the notion of the ‘allegorical map’.Echoing Engels and speaking of Zola’s Pot-Bouille, where class is located acrossan apartment from top to bottom, Jameson writes that this novel shows theallegorical structure of class consciousness through this ‘map or chart ofsociety as a whole’.23 Jameson goes on to contrast this allegorical structure ofEuropean realism with the ‘essential impossibility’ of such a form in writingfrom the United States. He notes that the value of works like Zola’s is that theyshow what ‘we’ are now lacking.24 This type of writing has become impossiblein the US, he argues, because, ‘if there is something unique in the Americanclass situation, it has to do with a kind of overflowing of national limits in sucha way that the older national experience, a microcosm in which the truth of theindividual coincides with the socio-economic structure, is no longer avail-able’.25 In short, then, we could say that the task of the critic is to unveil thesestructures of experience and re-articulate the national situation within itsinternational frame.

He puts this point in a more general theoretical frame in the concludingchapter of Marxism and Form which I quote at length because it gets to theheart of Jameson’s theory of experience: ‘Thus the process of criticism is not somuch an interpretation of content as it is a revealing of it, a laying bare, arestoration of the original message, the original experience, beneath thedistortions of the various kinds of censorship that have been at work uponit.’26 And, a few pages later, he continues:

The terms in which the socio-economic dimension of experience are describedare however by no means limited to those of the work . . . Such authenticityis . . . therefore that which restores to us some fitful contact with genuineexperience, and the form which such contact takes is at one with the historicalpossibilities of the socio-economic organisation itself.27

The terms of particular interest for Jameson’s theory of experience here are‘genuine’ or ‘original’ experience, ‘fitful contact’ and ‘historical possibilities’.

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Given Jameson’s use of ‘authenticity’ in this passage, the terms’ appearanceafter the Sartre chapter in Marxism and Form, and Jameson’s general proclivityfor working with Sartre,28 I want to suggest that these are Sartrean terms, orthat, at the very least, they can be productively read through the later Sartre ofSearch for a Method and Jameson’s own favourite, Critique of DialecticalReason.29

Again, it is important not to mistake ‘genuine or original experience’ for pureexperience*it is not some organic moment of seeing the whole and the part inperfect alignment. Rather, it is fitful and it is delimited by possibility. Later inhis career, Sartre attempted to bridge his existentialist version of phenomen-ology and Marxism, and the question of possibility forms an important part ofthat bridge. One important intervention of phenomenology in the history ofphilosophy was to move from the question, ‘What is possible’, to the re-articulation of being, of ‘is’, as a series of possibilities. Consider, for example,the classical philosophical object, the table. Plato would have said that therewas a Form of a table behind all instances of tables; Aristotle would have madea list of the attributes of the various possible tables; while Husserl suggestedthat we can know the table as a phenomenon whose eidos we could understandthrough the eidetic variation, that is, a process of varying the table in ourimagination to such an extent that we arrived at something which was no longera table, and, at that point of difference, understood what a table was.

Part of understanding a table as a phenomenon was to understand not theconditions of possibility of making a table (an essence in the world, a set ofattributes), but rather what conditions a table made possible which would nolonger be possible after the variation. For example, a table makes it possible forme to sit as I am as I compose this essay. A table as a phenomenon, in otherwords, creates a certain set of possibilities for placing, eating, and so forth.30

Now in Husserl’s phenomenology it remained possible to recollect all thesepossibilities into a coherent picture of the essence of the phenomenon throughthe mental faculty to provide what he called ‘re-tensions’ and ‘pro-tensions’.Husserl understood the limits of possibility, but his interest was in the ability ofthe mind, not the circumstances surrounding the table. Heidegger famouslydisagreed and thereby extended the analysis into the historical realm.Epistemologically, Heidegger held, it was not possible to hold on to all thoseimages of a phenomenon. One only got snippets, and one made one’s choicesfrom these snippets.31 Heidegger thus introduced historicity into the idea ofpossibility. It was not just about tables anymore, but an entire life which couldbe understood as a project of working through the various possibilities given ata specific time: ‘As long as it is, Dasein always has understood itself and alwayswill understand itself in terms of possibilities.’32

It is finally in Sartre’s hands that these notions are given the political registerthat can be used to interpret the passage from Jameson’s early work. For Sartre,it is not just a question of working through possibilities, but of actively trying tochange them. Thus Sartre writes,

To say what man ‘is’ is also to say what he can be . . . The material conditions ofhis existence circumscribe the field of his possibilities . . . It is by transcending the

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given toward the field of possibles and by realising one possibility from amongall the others that the individual objectifies himself and contributes to makinghistory.33

One is what one is only through the possibilities for experience that one canmake out of the given situation.

But Jameson shrewdly notes that the situation is more complicated than itappears. A vulgar Marxist expression of Sartre’s formula, for instance, wouldbe that what we experience are the possibilities available to us in a giveneconomic situation. What makes this a vulgar formulation is that it allowsone to say, for example, ‘I had that job, now a migrant worker does. I thereforehave been wronged by way of a historical possibility, and need to wagestruggle against migration.’ Such an interpretation is what Jameson calledabove the ‘censorship’ of the ‘original experience’. Censorship is here to beunderstood not solely as stopping someone from seeing something, but ratherstopping them from seeing something by giving them something else to see.Here, the possibility to experience the totality (the networks of global capitalthat cause downsizing, migration and the need for surplus labour) is occludedby a pre-given local interpretation of the experience. Jameson’s genius as a criticis to see this situation of censorship and the need to return, through a dialecticalcritique, to the possibilities of experiencing the totality. As he puts it so well inthe closing lines of Marxism and Form: ‘It therefore falls to literary criticismto continue to compare the inside and the outside, existence and history, tocontinue to pass judgment on the abstract quality of life in the present, and tokeep alive the idea of a concrete future.’34

This Sartrean line of a concrete future, a concrete project for individuals toaspire to, provides us with avery distinct form of politics: the attempt to changethe present and thus to re-route what becomes possible in the future. However,this Sartrean idea is explicitly absent from ‘Third-World Literature in the Era ofMultinational Capitalism’. Something funny has happened between 1971 and1986, where Jameson is no longer telling a story about changing possibilities,but rather about a situation in which possibilities have been blocked off (‘all . . .necessarily’). It seems that a shift occurs in Jameson’s work then, a shift we canbest locate in the years leading up to the ‘Third World’ essay*particularly twowritings from 1982, ‘Progress Versus Utopia; Or, Can we Imagine the Future?’and ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’.35

In general in the 1980s, Jameson engages more and more with postmodernculture in film, architecture and urbanism, and, as he does so, his pessimismabout the present grows as well. Such pessimism is certainly detectable inMarxism and Form as he writes about ‘the essential impossibility of Americanwriting’, but it is really only with the writings on postmodernism that thismove away from changing historical possibilities is complete. Jameson, aswe shall see, comes to take on a different view of time, a spatialized one,which allows not for projection into the future, but only the disruption of thepresent by the future.36

The title of Jameson’s essay on the meaning of science fiction gets at the cruxof the difference here. ‘Progress’ implies the movement of projection, the ability

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to go through the present toward something else. ‘Utopia’, as Jameson uses it,means that because we cannot project out from the present, we must insteadinvent a future completely outside of what we have in order to disrupt thecurrent system. Sartrean progress disappears, and we are left instead withBenjamin’s vision:

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has beensmashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wingswith such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistiblypropels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debrisbefore him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.37

To the question, ‘can we imagine the future’, Jameson thus pointedly states no,and that what science fiction shows is the opposite of what we commonlyassume: ‘Its deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and todramatise our incapacity to imagine the future’ and to thereby ‘succeed byfailure’ since it forms ‘a contemplation of our own absolute limits’.38 Notunimportantly, these remarks once again occur around a discussion ofexperience. What this contemplation of our limits is said to do is ‘todefamiliarise and restructure our experience of our own present’. In otherwords, to employ ‘elaborate strategies of indirection [which] are thereforenecessary if we are somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to‘‘experience’’, for the first and real time, this ‘‘present,’’ which is after all all wehave’.39 It is not literature’s task to talk about what is going on here and how tochange it*this is already censored and impossible; rather it can only enable usto see (with the aid of dialectical criticism), by interrupting the present.

We can thus notice here the essential gesture of the Third World essay, i.e. anew sense of ‘our own’ possibilities for experience through complicatednarrative strategies that come from the outside.40 Indeed, just as in Marxismand Form and the Third World essay, these strategies cannot come from theUnited States but rather only the Soviet Union.41 This ‘Second World SF’presents First World readers with a non-commodity-saturated atmosphere, sothat the capitalist world which ‘characterises our own daily experience, issuddenly and unexpectedly stilled’.42 Jameson is no doubt right to suggest, aswith the ‘Third World’ essay, that experiencing cultures outside one’s own canre-orient how one experiences everyday life. At the same time, the recurrenttheme (in Marxism and Form with regard to Europe, in ‘Progress versusUtopia’ with regard to the Second World, and in ‘Third-World Literature’ withregard to the Third World) that Americans are no longer able to experience theworld and that their sense of things must therefore be redeemed from theoutside remains problematic. As even Slavoj Zizek understands, ‘Colonizationwas never simply the imposition of Western values, the assimilation of theOriental and other Others to the European Sameness; it was always also thesearch for the lost spiritual innocence of OUR OWN civilization.’43 Jameson isnot searching out some spiritual experience, but rather a political one, and he isdangerously displacing that experience on to everywhere other than the UnitedStates. Experience, in other words, is not a set of possibilities historicallyavailable, it is not even the Sartrean ‘future more or less blocked off’,44 rather it

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is ‘essentially impossible’ for someone within the United States to experiencethe world other than in its fragmented, distorted form. What we can detect,then, is a shift from a temporal concept of experience to a spatialized one. Thereason for this shift is explained in the ‘Postmodernism’ essay.

Jameson’s well known essay on postmodernism forms a double link at thisconjuncture. First, it further diagnoses the current state of US (First World)experience and its fragmentations. Second, it adds a theoretical tool, ‘cognitivemapping’, to Jameson’s general notion of dialectical criticism. It is the idea ofcognitive mapping, combined with a Benjaminian analysis of storytelling,which sets the stage for the Third World essay.

In ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, Jamesonpioneered a way of understanding what constituted postmodernism across anumber of fields and genres. He added to our understanding of the present aseries of terms, including the depthlessness of the image, the waning of affect,the loss of historicity and the rise of pastiche. He also related these changesonce again to the topic of experience, stating that postmodernism is ‘theenormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioningrepresentations of our own current experience’.45 What we experience, in otherwords, is an inability to understand or conceptualize that very experience. Thisis a painfully paralysing situation, which Jameson sums up in a well knownsentence:

If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions andre-tensions across the temporal manifold, and to organize its past and future intocoherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the culturalproductions of such a subject could result in anything but ‘heaps of fragments’and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and thealeatory.46

Once again, I think this sentence only becomes fully comprehensible when readin light of Jameson’s own intellectual history, and in particular what appears tobe a reference to both Husserl and Henri Bergson. The terms ‘re-tension’ and‘pro-tension’, as we saw above, are Husserlian in origin. But the term ‘tension’ isalso a key Bergsonian notion from Matter and Memory, where he uses it todefine the ability of the mind to synthesize moments in time, and, through thissynthesis, ‘consciousness [can] retain the past better and better, so as toorganise it with the present in a newer and richer decision’.47 For Bergson,fuller experiences of life’s vitality occurred specifically because of the ability ofthe mind to ‘extend itself across the temporal manifold’.

But Jameson, going beyond Lefebvre,48 not only re-orients the discussiontoward space, but suggests here that politics can only occur at the level of space.As he said in an interview about the ‘Postmodernism’ essay, ‘That notion of‘‘deep time’’, of Bergsonian time, seems radically irrelevant to our contem-porary experience, which is one of a perpetual spatial present. Our theoreticalcategories also tend to become spatial.’49 With the Husserlian/Bergsoniancapacity to retain (‘re-tensions’) the past, also goes the Sartrean ability toproject (‘pro-tensions’) into the future. Jameson’s theoretical category ofexperience then itself becomes spatialized.50

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What Jameson offers then, so to speak, is a ‘spatial fix’:51‘a model of politicalculture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatialissues as its fundamental organizing concern. I will therefore provisionallydefine the aesthetic of such new (and hypothetical) cultural forms as anaesthetic of cognitive mapping.’52 To define this form of cognitive mapping,Jameson relies on Kevin Lynch’s understanding of the contemporary city as aspace where the individual cannot ‘map’ in her mind her relationship to a largerspace. What cognitive maps should do, then, is to make possible that impossiblelink between the subject and the overwhelming city space.53

In concluding his essay, Jameson moves this aesthetic from the city to theglobe, arguing that all future forms of representation will have to deal withglobalization and ‘invent radically new forms’*such as the national allegory*‘in order to do it justice’.54 Moreover, he argues, cognitive mapping cannot takeas its focal point the city or even the nation, but must deal with the world spaceof global capitalism. Only in this context can any truly political art be formed*although the very possibility of such an art he still questions. Once again, we seethe themes that have recurred throughout Jameson’s career*the necessity ofworking within the given historical and economic conditions, the need in thepresent to create radically new forms of both art and critique in order to cometo terms with these conditions, and, finally, the importance of relating the partto the whole within these new forms. What has changed here is the form of theprojection. The individual no longer can project his or her future in the Sartreansense; rather what is called for is a sheer Herculean effort to imagine the worldin its totality.

Around the same time, Jameson published an essay entitled ‘Rimbaud andthe Spatial Text’, which begins as an attempt to understand Rimbaud’s ASeason in Hell as just such a Herculean effort. Jameson argues that Rimbaud’srather absurd statements about Africans, Asians, and all ‘others’ be read as thenecessary absurdity deployed by the author in order to grasp the totality in amodern, imperial world.55 Jameson’s own essay can be read in similar terms*as his own absurd meanderings utilized in order to grasp the totality. The essaycan be seen, in other words, as a kind of fictional map with the impossible taskto trace the entire world.

Jameson’s attempt to create that map perhaps tells us something beyond thisabout the nature of his project to grasp the totality, just as Rimbaud’s A Seasonin Hell did for Jameson. So, if absurd ramblings were modern poetry’s answer tothe question of totality, what is Jameson’s answer for postmodern times? Hegave a potential answer in 1993 when, on the occasion of Jacques Derrida’slecture on the Specters of Marx at Duke University, Jameson conducted aninterview with two Swedish writers which has just been published in English.56

In that interview he makes a striking remark. He begins, ‘But we’re alsoworking out of certain kinds of national situations, and the most importantthing for us as first world intellectuals is to be open to the experience of bothintellectuals and artists and people generally in other parts of the world.’ Up tothis point, we can see once again the merit of how Jameson poses the questionof experience. But then he adds, ‘We have to cannibalize their possibilities ofexperience in the absence of our own, in much the same way as Paul Simon has

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to cannibalize South African music.’57 He then goes on to say this is a way ofmaking the international intellectual movement on the Left that Derridaspeaks of in Specters.

This statement, that ‘we have to cannibalize their possibilities of experience’,is striking in many ways, but should make sense in the context of Jameson’sintellectual history*the need to redeem the US experience from the outside,the idea that experiences are encased within historical possibilities, and finallythat we are in a desperate situation where ‘we’ lack any historical possibilities.But to understand the comment on ‘cannibalizing’, there is a bit more to say.

First, this possibility was perhaps on Jameson’s mind in the context ofDerrida since the latter had begun writing and lecturing on the topic in thelate 1980s and early 1990s.58 In an interview around this time, Derrida statedthat it is

no longer [a question] of knowing if it is ‘good’ to eat the other or if the other is‘good’ to eat, nor of knowing which other. One eats him regardless and letsoneself be eaten by him . . . Since one must eat in any case and since it is andtastes good to eat, [the question becomes...] how for goodness’ sake should oneeat well[?]59

Derrida suggests we must learn to eat without ‘violence’, by ‘learning andgiving to eat, learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat’.60 I imagine that the idea thatcannibalization is something we ‘always already’ do, and so it is somethingthat we must learn to negotiate rather than forbid, was on Jameson’s mindwhen he made his own remark in the interview.

But there is also another moment when cannibals come up in Jameson’swork, and that is in his reading of Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’, in the essayon Third World literature. In Lu Xun’s story, Jameson tells us, the paranoidnarrator comes to feel that all those around him are cannibals. Jamesonexplicates this scene as follows:

For it should be clear that the cannibalism literally apprehended by the suffererin the attitudes and bearing of his family and neighbours is at one and the sametime being attributed by Lu Xun himself to Chinese society as a whole . . . LuXun’s proposition is that the people of this great maimed and retarded,disintegrating China of the late and post-imperial period, his fellow citizens,are ‘literally’ cannibals: in their desperation, disguised and indeed intensified bythe most traditional forms and procedures of Chinese culture, they must devourone another ruthlessly to stay alive.61

What then are we doing when we ‘cannibalize possibilities of experience’? DoesJameson not represent the United Sates as being in the same position, in thisglobalized world which we could easily describe as ‘great maimed and retarded,disintegrating [United States] of the late and post-imperial period’? Is he not,then, simply cannibalizing others in such a space because he too must do so‘ruthlessly [in order] to stay alive’, to redeem the US experience in a frighteningpolitical moment?

We can see then in this interview both what critics of Jameson have so hatedabout his original essay and what his recent defenders have found to be more

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laudatory. He expresses here, on the one hand, the need to remain open to newexperiences and to question one’s own experiential position before critiquingthat of others. On the other hand, he states quite bluntly that the experience heis most interested in is one of the First World needing and consuming theexperiences of others for its own ends. This is not good counsel.

When Ahmad read Jameson’s essay, he got the feeling that according toJameson, ‘Politically, we [Third Worlders] are Calibans all.’ If Ahmad looks atJameson and sees himself reflected back as a Caliban, then perhaps it is becauseof the distorted mirror through which they look at each other, since Jameson, asit were, looks at Ahmad and sees himself reflected back as a cannibal.

I have tried in this essay to remove some of the distortions from the mirrorbetween Jameson, Ahmad and others by considering both the positive andnegative potentials of Jameson’s text. I hope, at the very least, to have shownthat the debate that has raged around the text vis-a-vis the question ofnationalism needs also to reckon with this theme of experience, which I havesuggested is in fact the crucial term of Jameson’s essay. Moreover, to fullyunderstand what Jameson is doing with the term experience, I have tried tochart briefly the intellectual history of experience within his work, and how itsultimate spatialized form laid the theoretical framework for his conjecturesabout Third World literature.

We might then summarize Jameson’s trajectory as follows. He begins with aSartrean and generally phenomenological theory of experience which looks athow the ability of the subject to project future possibilities for experiences ispolitically distributed in a society. He adds to this a sophisticated Marxistnotion of the ‘original experience’ of the economic totality. Following hisstudies in postmodernism, he then pulls out a pessimistic line from Sartre,combined with the even more doubtful thoughts of Benjamin, to suggest thatthis temporal view of experience cannot withstand the representationalmoment of postmodernism, where abilities to project and imagine betterfutures are lost.

Jameson thus turns to a spatialized view of experience. Here experience itselfis said to be defined by certain economic geographies and therefore can only bechanged by re-orienting these economic spaces through dialectical critique andcognitive mapping. It is in this theoretical climate that Jameson considers thenarrative strategies available for such re-orientation, and deems the nationalallegory (produced by the experience of colonialism) as the genre parexcellence. He makes this claim explicitly as a ‘first-worlder’, concerned aboutthe disappearing experience of even allegorical totality in his geographic space.His essay becomes a self-described cannibalistic exercise in reviving thepossibilities of experience for ‘the contemporary American scene’.62

It would be beyond the scope of the present essay to now make a sustainedargument for or against this theory of experience, although I think it is clearthat the type of colonization of experience Jameson ultimately comes toespouse should be discarded and rethought. This is certainly not to say,however, that Jameson’s work itself should simply be abnegated. Rather I havetried here to re-orient the discussion of his work and its utility toward arenewed discussion on the terms of experience, and to suggest that how we

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consider and perform postcolonial literary criticism, if not global relationsmore generally, might want to follow Jameson in at least coming to termswith this topic, even if only to disagree. With more in-depth investigations ofglobal experience we might even see more of the totality*more of how thegeographic, temporal, and economic limitations on contemporary experienceare being shaped and unevenly distributed the world over.

Notes1 F Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, 16, 1986, p 69.2 For critiques see A Ahmad, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘‘National Allegory’’’, Social

Text, 17, 1987, pp 3�25; M Sprinker, ‘The National Question: Said, Ahmad, Jameson’, Public Culture, 6,

1993, pp 3�29 (Sprinker, it should be noted, was not entirely opposed to Jameson’s formulations); G

Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1999, pp 109�110. For defences see I Buchanan, ‘National Allegory Today: A

Return to Jameson’, and I Szeman, ‘Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism,

Globalization’, in C Irr and I Buchanan (eds), On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization,

Albany: SUNY Press, 2005; N Lazarus, ‘Fredric Jameson on ‘‘Third-World Literature’’: A Qualified

Defence’, in D Kellner and S Homer (eds), Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader, New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2004.3 F Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1979. Though the term seems in fact to originate in Jameson, Marxism and Form:

Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971,

pp 398�400.4 M Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme, Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2005. This was also the case with Bergsonism and phenomenology,

neither of which Jay discusses.5 Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature’, p 65.6 Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature’, p 67.7 Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature’, p 69.8 I explore this process in more depth below. Jameson gives a succinct explanation in ‘Rimbaud and the

Spatial Text’, in Tak-Wai Wong (ed), Rewriting Literary History, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University

Press, 1984, pp 66�88. I refer to the reprinted version in The Modernist Papers, New York: Verso, 2007,

pp 239�240.9 Ahmad, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness’, p 10.

10 Ahmad, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness’, p 14.11 Jameson ‘Third-World Literature’, p 73.12 For a broad overview of Benjamin’s work on experience, see chapter 7 in Jay, Songs of Experience.13 ‘ . . . which is perhaps his masterpiece’, p 77.14 F Jameson, Sartre: The Origins of a Style, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, p 206.15 W Benjamin, Illuminations, New York: Schocken, 1968, p 84.16 Benjamin, Illuminations, p 108.17 Cited in Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 73.18 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 72.19 Benjamin, Illuminations, p 86.20 This question does not replace the other one, of course, for it is not so easy as to say there are no facts

and nothing but stories. Since facts are not entirely self-evident, however, their categorization in

narrative remains a focal political point.21 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 4.22 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 4.23 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 399.24 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 399. Something crucial here is Jameson’s insistence that this difference

has ‘profound value’ for Americans. Indeed, throughout his oeuvre, Jameson looks abroad to find

solutions to what he sees as the increasing stagnation on the US cultural scene. He will repeat this point

in his response to Ahmad, writing, ‘The essay was intended as an intervention into a ‘‘first-world’’

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literary and critical situation, in which it seemed important to me to stress the loss of certain literary

functions and intellectual commitments in the contemporary American scene. It seemed useful to

dramatize that loss by showing the constitutive presence of those things . . . in other parts of the world.’

Jameson, ‘A Brief Response’, Social Text, 17, 1987, p 26.25 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 399. It is strange for Jameson to say that this is unique to America, and

he no doubt knows that the situation is otherwise. He himself says as much in ‘Modernism and

Imperialism’ while writing about Joyce: ‘What is determined by the colonial system is now a rather

different kind of meaning loss . . . for colonialism means that a significant structural segment of the

economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside of the daily life

and existential experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own life experience and

life world*very different from that of the imperial power*remain unknown and unimaginable for the

subjects of the imperial power, whatever social class they may belong to.’ Jameson, ‘Modernism and

Imperialism’, in Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,

1990, pp 50�51.26 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 404.27 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 407.28 On the importance of starting with Sartre to understand Jameson’s work, see S Homer, ‘Sartrean

Origins’, in Kellner and Homer, Jameson: A Critical Reader.29 I refer to the two works together since they appear as such in French.30 Husserl worked around these ideas a lot, but had little interest in the history of philosophy per se. His

thoughts in this area are thus primarily worked out around his writings on the body. Merleau-Ponty was

among the first to write about this, in ‘The Spatiality and Motility of One’s Body’, in The

Phenomenology of Perception, C Smith (trans), New York: Routledge, 2002, although he does very

little to acknowledge Husserl. More direct readings of these questions appear in J Dodd, Idealism and

Corporeity: An Essay on the Problem of the Body in Husserl’s Phenomenology, New York: Springer, 1997;

and J N Mohanty, ‘Husserl on ‘Possibility’, Husserl Studies, 1, 1984, pp 13�29.31 For a straightforward introduction to this disagreement, see M Inwood, Heidegger, Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1997, pp 27�28.32 M Heidegger, Being and Time, New York: Harper & Row, 1962, §145. If I have spent so long with these

phenomenological questions, it not just because of their importance for Sartre, but also for Jameson,

who always had a certain Marxist reading of even Heidegger. See F Jameson, Jameson on Jameson:

Conversations on Cultural Marxism, I Buchanan (ed), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007,

pp 29�30 and 175�176.33 J P Sartre, Search for a Method, H E Barnes (trans), New York: Vintage, 1968, p 93.34 Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 416.35 This latter was delivered as a talk at the Whitney Museum in 1982, and published in its most well-known

form as ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146, July�August,

1984, pp 52�92. I will cite from the NLR version.36 Even when, in texts like Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson writes about time, he will thus write about

it in a spatialized form. Jameson there will take the concept of ‘disruption’ from Habermas’s reading of

Benjamin, and use it as a way to suggest a spatial time to disrupt the present: ‘the future as disruption

(Beunruhigung) of the present, and as a radical and systemic break with even the predicted and

colonized future which is simply a prolongation of our capitalist present’. Jameson, Archaeologies of the

Future, New York: Verso, 2005, p 228. The present is homogeneous time and thus does not move

through duration, but only continuation. The future, as such, is dislodged from a continuity with the

present, and presented instead as a spatial location that will come to the present to disrupt it.37 Benjamin, Illuminations, p 258. We might say that Jameson always oscillated between two poles of what

Said would call ‘late style’: the future-orientation strategy of Sartre and the future-disruption strategy of

Benjamin, whose own historical circumstances certainly contributed to their differing views.38 F Jameson, ‘Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?’ Science-Fiction Studies, 9, 1982,

p 153.39 Jameson, ‘Progress versus Utopia’, p 151.40 Ahmad was thus right to draw a line through Jameson’s previous work on experience, but he didn’t have

the time in his polemic reply to connect it all the way.41 Jameson, ‘Progress versus Utopia’, p 153.42 Jameson, ‘Progress versus Utopia’, p 155.43 S Zizek, On Belief, New York: Routledge, 2000, pp 67�68.44 Sartre, Search for a Method, p 95.45 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, p 68.

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46 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, p 71.47 H Bergson, Matter and Memory, New York: George Allen and Unwin, 1919, p 332.48 See H Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp 21�22.49 Jameson, Jameson on Jameson, p 47.50 There is nothing necessarily wrong with such a position. A spatialized theory of experience can help us

understand many things about the present; what is questionable here is the directions into whichJameson takes this theory.

51 I use the term ‘spatial fix’ as a critique. It is David Harvey’s, and it refers to how capitalism tries to saveitself through colonial expansion when the inner contradictions are too great. See Harvey, ‘The SpatialFix: Hegel, Von Thunen, and Marx’, Antipode, 13, 1981, pp 1�12. Reprinted in Spaces of Capital:

Toward a Critical Geography, New York: Taylor & Francis, 2001, ch 14.52 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, p 89.53 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, p 89.54 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, p 92. One might also note here Jameson’s antedated response to Ahmad on

the relationship between global cognitive mapping in the pre- and post-industrial worlds: ‘This is not,then, clearly a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparentnational space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the newpolitical art*if it is indeed possible at all*will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is tosay, to its fundamental object*the world space of multinational capital*at the same time at which itachieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which wemay again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity toact and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.’

55 Jameson, ‘Rimbaud and the Spatial Text’, p 242.56 In Jameson, Jameson on Jameson, pp 151�170.57 Jameson, Jameson on Jameson, pp 167�168. Earlier in the interview, Jameson says of Paul Simon’s

Graceland, ‘[It’s] not only plagiarism, cultural theft, or whatever, it’s also a form of cultural diffusionwhich is comparable, if you like, in mass culture to what the Romantics did for world culture in the earlynineteenth century’ (p 161). Again, this is not an either/or. There is a politics here, and there is anattempt at cultural diffusion, whether by Simon or the Romantics. The two, indeed, are intimately linkedand we need to further think this through.

58 Including an unpublished seminar on the ‘Rhetorics of Cannibalism’ at UC-Irvine in 1990.59 ‘‘‘Eating Well’’ or the Calculation of the Subject’, interview with E Cadava, P Connor and J L Nancy, in

Points . . . Interviews, 1974�1994, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p 282, emphases in original.60 ‘‘‘Eating Well’’’, emphases in original.61 Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature’, p 71.62 Jameson, ‘A Brief Response’, p 26.

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we are cannibals all fredric jameson on

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