Fredric Jameson’s Innovative Marxism

Michael Principe

SINCE HIS DEATH on September 22 of last year at the age of 90, Marxist theorist and cultural critic, Fredric Jameson has been the subject of numerous tributes and remembrances. Arriving from divergent spaces, they include left and liberal publications like The Nation and Jacobin, Marxist theorists Alex Callinicos (for Socialist Worker) and Boris Kagarlitsky from prison in Russia (for Links International), and many others.

Noteworthy too are the approving remembrances published by such heavy hitters of the bourgeoisie as The New York Times (with two separate pieces) and The Washington Post. All of this is appropriate for a writer who consistently produced an astonishing amount of insightful and at times groundbreaking material over his career.

As one might expect, these tributes engage with Jameson’s Marxism in a variety of ways. Kate Wagner writes in The Nation, “The outpouring of mourning that followed (his death) seemed to unite even the most fractious of intellectual combatants within the broader left.”(1)

A.O. Scott in The New York Times describes him as “the most prominent Marxist literary critic in the English-speaking world. In other words, he was a fairly obscure figure…”(2) Scott, while full of praise for Jameson, personally distances himself from Jameson’s Marxism: “I’d like to say something about why, as a critic, Jameson mattered to me. And maybe, more generally, to the nonacademic, not necessarily Marxist brand of criticism that I and some of my comrades try to practice….”

Why Jameson Matters

Someone unfamiliar with Jameson may wish to go beyond the obituaries and ask, what makes him important to such a large audience? A reader of a certain sort may ask more specifically, how does Jameson’s work relate to Marxist theory?

Further, we can ask, what do the answers to these questions have in common? Let’s attempt something of a response.

Interestingly, one point of entry into Jameson’s extensive, rich and varied body of work, is by considering the establishment press’s positive evaluation of a figure who regularly and in no uncertain terms proclaimed his Marxism, labeling it the “untranscendable horizon” of critical thought, uniquely capable of subsuming (but also preserving) other critical perspectives.(3)

Would Jameson be surprised to be celebrated by these mainstream publications? By his praise across the various political positions of the “fractious left”?

Almost certainly not. Actually, such attention usefully illustrates important aspects of Jameson’s work, starting with his analysis of the postmodern, one of Jameson’s major theoretical contributions, and the one by which he is now best known.

While Jameson published his first book (on Jean Paul Sartre) in 1961, the work on postmodernism began in the early 1980s and was solidified with the publication of Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991.(4) The works that followed deepened and extended this analysis.

If the question is how to fit Jameson’s Marxism with his mainstream appreciation, we might ask, more generally, how in the current (postmodern) moment we are to judge whether something fits into or is placed properly within a given context? For Jameson, the space for any sort of response is historical. The first sentence of The Political Unconscious (1981) is “Always historicize!”(5)

The first sentence of the postmodernism book, by contrast, speaks to the context in which any such work must occur: “It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”(6)

The postmodern is in part characterized, for Jameson, as a space where, lacking a larger historical narrative, it is difficult to envision things “fitting” together. The proper, i.e. totalizing perspective is lacking.

The “whole” cannot be represented. Seemingly, anything can go anywhere. So it is, for example, with aesthetic pastiche and collage or the loss of distinction between high and low art. Jameson in the New York Times? Sure.

What makes Jameson’s intervention into the postmodernism debates strikingly original is that as a Marxist, his project is not the rejection of postmodern theory (nor is it an acceptance). Terry Eagleton and Alex Callinicos each have produced valuable book-length Marxist takedowns of postmodern theory.(7)

Jameson’s subject matter is different, a difference that Jameson laments has caused “some to conclude that, in my own case, having ‘become’ a postmodernist I must have ceased to be a Marxist in any meaningful (or in other words, stereotypical) sense.”(8)

Perry Anderson has characterized Jameson’s project as one intended to “capture” postmodernism for Marxism.(9) Douglas Kellner writes that Jameson attempts “to show that a reconstructed Marxian theory can provide the most comprehensive and penetrating theory of postmodernism itself.”(10)

Culture and Economy

Jameson, sometimes slyly referring to himself as a “vulgar Marxist,” sees his project as grounded in the economic base, here characterized as “late capitalism.”

Jameson attempts to roughly align himself with Ernest Mandel’s periodization of capitalism, where capitalism can be characterized as moving from market capitalism to the monopoly/imperialism stage to the current stage of late capitalism, characterized by multinational capital and globalization, really the purist form of capitalism with commodification penetrating previously uncommodified areas and to which Marx’s critique straightforwardly applies.

To these Jameson aligns his own cultural periodization of realism, modernism, and post-modernism. Crucial to the entire analysis is the idea that culture has become barely distinguishable from economy.

Jameson insists against some of his critics that the notion of the postmodern under discussion is not a purely cultural one, but rather that “postmodernism” names a mode of production. One way to think about this is as a totalizing version of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Culture Industry.”

In Jameson’s 1990 book on Adorno, he writes that “It now seems to me possible … that Adorno’s Marxism, which was no great help in the previous periods, may turn out to be just what we need today.”(11)

Adorno’s desperate pessimism and search for moments of subjectivity within a totalizing system is, for Jameson, relevant in a way it was not in a previous period with its ascendent radical activism, utopian sensibilities, and anti-colonial struggles.

Lost in the current period is the “semi-autonomy” of the cultural sphere. Jameson often contrasts this with the view expressed in Marcuse’s 1937 essay, “The Affirmative Character of Culture.” While it may then have been true, as Marcuse asserts, that high culture played a role which placed it psychically outside the economy, taking “up the historical demand for the general liberation of the individual,”(12) this is no longer the case.(13)

In the current era, for Jameson, everything (i.e. the global economy and all of social life) is culture: “with the eclipse of culture as an autonomous space or sphere, culture itself falls into the world, and the result is not its disappearance but its prodigious expansion, to the point where culture becomes coterminous with social life in general…everything has at length become cultural, from the superstructures down in to the mechanisms of the infrastructure itself.”(14)

For Jameson, the literature of modernism generally stood apart from and was critical of the market. Postmodern literature is part of the market and may even celebrate it.

Characteristic of the postmodern is “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense…”15 Observable in Warhol’s portraits and in postmodern architecture such as the Wells Fargo Center in Los Angeles, such depthlessness applies to human experience as well, yielding individuals more likely to be recognized as fragmented or schizophrenic than alienated.

Postmodern Subject and Class

While poststructuralism in its various forms swims in the conceptual sea of anti-humanism, proclaiming “the death of the subject,” thereby foreclosing the possibility of its liberation, Jameson’s approach is more nuanced, dialectical, and decidedly Marxist.

As with poststructuralism and other postmodern theory, Jameson holds that in the postmodern period, the bourgeois self, which characterized modernity, is eclipsed. In contrast, Jameson sees in a painting like Edward Munch’s The Scream “a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation…”(16)

While poststructuralism would suggest that such a centered, self-conscious subject was an illusion all along, Jameson sees its demise as a product of late capitalism. This consequence can yield the playfulness of postmodern cultural artifacts, liberated from alienation and anomie, but also in part liberated from all deep emotion, what Jameson calls “the waning of affect.”

Cynicism, detachment, and the easygoing acceptance of extreme violence and sexuality in film and elsewhere is common. While this may constitute a real loss, Jameson makes clear both in the cultural items with which he engages and with his own affirmations that he enjoys much postmodern aesthetic production. Here, again, we glimpse Jameson’s dialectical thinking.

Jameson doesn’t reject or say “no” to postmodern culture. Instead, he suggests that we need to look at what might emerge from it. Any current state of things, regardless of its afflictions, can be a fruitful ground for its own dialectical negation. Jameson likes to remind his readers that, of course, Marx saw socialism as dialectically emergent from capitalism.

With older forms of the economic sphere being restructured on a global scale, he suggests toward the end of Postmodernism… that “a new international proletariat (taking forms we cannot yet imagine) will reemerge from this convulsive upheaval…”(17)

In a rather traditional Marxist manner, Jameson sees this as requiring class consciousness, though what he means by this is less traditional. Here, Jameson introduces his concept of “cognitive mapping,” a concept he describes as a “codeword for ‘class consciousness — only…class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed-of kind…”(18)

He writes elsewhere that this notion was “meant to suggest that our task today as artists or critics or whatever is somehow to attempt to recapture or reinvent a new form of representation of this new global totality.”(19)

Capitalist Stages

The term itself comes from Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960). The alienated city for Lynch is one where its inhabitants are unable to retain an image of where they are and how they can find their way about.

Jameson greatly expands upon this idea. Essentially, Mandel’s stages of capitalism all carry with them different spatial sensibilities.

Aesthetic production, for Jameson, reflects this. In the market capitalist/realist phase, people oriented themselves toward the nation-state. In this context, they live in smaller cities, know who their enemies are, who stands socially above and below them, etc. This is Cartesian, grid-like space and coincides with the rise of the novel.

With the monopoly/imperialist stage, the nation expands beyond its borders, predominately by way of colonialism. Parts of the inside are now outside. Parts of the outside are now inside. Modernism, for Jameson, reflects this economic development, i.e. it becomes harder to illustrate the social totality.

Works like Joyce’s Ulysses, according to Jameson, attempt to solve this unsolvable problem: “the premise of all modernism is that language cannot express these things — that finally the human psyche is too complicated, you can’t trace the map of society, you can’t position yourself outside of an individual life and look down at totality from above — and yet this is exactly what Joyce tries to do. This then is a necessary failure…”(20)

The complexity of the global economy, free-floating capital, new kinds of profits and financial transactions radically exacerbate the difficulties of representing the totality. This is the situation within the postmodern:

“I take such spatial peculiarities of postmodernism as symptoms and expressions of a new and historically original dilemma, one that involves our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities…”(21)

Politically, this is expressed in the enormous challenge of coordinating local, national, and global political action. For Jameson, “The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping on a social as well as a spatial scale.”(22)

“Absent Totality”

Accordingly, Jameson’s criticism often seeks to illustrate how a work relates to this unrepresentable totality. For example, In The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), his discussion of director Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 film All the President’s Men, concludes with an analysis of the scene where Jameson describes the film as taking a “cosmological” turn:

“…in which, as in the pre-Socratics, a virtually spherical vision of the nature of the universe comes into view. This is of course the famous and seemingly gratuitous shot of the Library of Congress, which literally rises from the very small (the reading room call slips) to the social totality itself.… For it is in the impossible vision of totality — here recovered in the moment in which the possibility of conspiracy confirms the possibility of the very unity of the social order itself — that is celebrated in this well-nigh paradisal moment…The mounting camera shot, which diminishes the fevered researches of the two investigators as it rises to disclose the frozen cosmology of the reading room’s circular balconies, confirms the momentary coincidence between knowledge as such and the architectural order of the astronomical totality itself, and yields a brief glimpse of the providential, as what organizes history but is unrepresentable within it.”(23)

The “absent totality” within late capitalism for Jameson is, of course, capital itself, which he describes as akin to “Spinoza’s God or Nature, the ultimate (indeed, perhaps the only) referent, the true ground of Being of our own time. Only by way of its fitful contemplation can its future, and our own, be somehow disclosed.”(24)

The aspiration here is toward something like Lukács’ “standpoint of the proletariat,” the only one capable of knowing the totality of the system, of recognizing the fetish character of all commodities. For Jameson, though, there is currently no possible representation of the whole under late capitalism.

The mode of Marxist criticism reflected here is typical of Jameson’s work from the very beginning. He generally emphasizes the form, style, and structure of presentation rather than the content of the work. This is illustrated even in the titles of his first two books separated by a decade: Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961) and Marxism and Form (1971).

The latter work contributes to another of Jameson’s major achievements, bringing attention to Hegelian, dialectical, “western” Marxism amid the positivistic and analytic thinking dominant in the American academy, but also in contrast to French post-structuralism. In it, he devotes chapters to figures (Sartre, Lukács, Bloch, Marcuse, Benjamin and Adorno) whom he groups together dialectically and which continue to be, along with others added later (Lacan, Althusser), theoretical touchstones going forward.

Utopia Against the Gloom

While one can find a bit of Frankfurt School style gloom in Jameson’s work, the overriding mood of his writing is more upbeat. This includes his engagement with Utopia, a kind of dialectical other to the gloom. The concept of utopia appears early in Jameson’s writing and is developed throughout, though the role that he sees it playing has varied even over the timespan of his writing career.

In 1971, he echoes Marcuse, writing that for Marx, “Utopian thought represented a diversion of revolutionary energy into idle wish-fulfillments and imaginary satisfactions, in our own time the very nature of the Utopian concept has undergone a dialectical reversal.”

In 1971, says Jameson, “The Utopian idea, on the contrary, keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is.”(25)

In 2005, he reflects on utopia’s evolving meaning. During the cold war, he writes that mainstream thinking took utopia as something like a perfection that could only be imposed by authoritarian means, exemplified by Stalin or the Gulag.

The rejection of utopia continued through the anti-authoritarian left’s embrace of “difference” as a slogan, adopting anarchist criticisms of Marxism as uniformly leveling and authoritarian. He does think (in 2005) that “Utopia seems to have recovered its vitality as a political slogan and a politically energizing perspective.”

The importance of utopia for Jameson can be appreciated in the context of the remark famously attributed to him, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”(26) Indeed, “one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet.”(27)

Accordingly, Jameson has devoted considerable attention to science fiction literature, which he reads as a literature of the mode of production.

An early champion of Philip K. Dick, whom he has called “the Shakespeare of science fiction,”(28) Jameson has written incisively about the differences between science fiction and fantasy literature — the latter generally involving castes rather than classes — how class struggle is reflected in the science fiction of extended life, and much more.

Instances of social connectivity evoke for Jameson the utopian. Certainly, class consciousness counts as such. But so does the collective mourning in the United States after the Kennedy assassination, which “gave a collective glimpse into some collective communicational ‘festival’ whose ultimate logic and promise is incompatible with our mode of production.”(29)

With “An American Utopia,”(30) Jameson even offers up his own speculative utopia, based on a transitional project to socialism that he sees as neither reform nor revolution. Instead, Jameson explores candidates for dual power, an idea associated with Lenin’s theorization of the coexistence of soviets (workers’ councils) and the Russian provisional government.

Jameson also links it to projects like the food kitchens, health care, and such provided by the Black Panthers or Hamas. Rejected as candidates to grow dual power are labor unions, churches, the professions, and the post office. Jameson settles, in a move sure to surprise his leftist readers, on the military.

In a kind of thought experiment, he starts by suggesting that every citizen between the ages of 16 and 60 be conscripted into the army. Along with full employment (working a minimum number of hours), key is the now universal healthcare provided by the Veterans Administration.

Considerable imaginative speculation follows, all of which is intentionally provocative. While much might be criticized here, we can also observe the openness to the new and unconventional that characterizes Jameson’s work more generally.

While some may see this as too abstract, Jameson at the very same time (2015) engages with the quite concrete when contributing the Foreward to Darko Suvin’s book on socialist Yugoslavia, writing that it would be hard to imagine a radical movement to overthrow capitalism “without some serious reconsideration of the success as well as the failure of the once famously ‘actually existing socialism.’”

Criticizing the role of the IMF and others, he writes, that the now former Yugoslavia has “something to tell us about capitalism, as well as about the unique socialism…”(31) assessed by Suvin. From imagined utopias to Yugoslavia, Jameson’s dialectic is expansive.

Constant Movement

When finding one’s way through Jameson, helpful is his own remark: “The peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing lies indeed in its holistic, ‘totalizing’ character: as though you could not say any one thing until you had first said everything.”(32)

The ease with which Jameson moves through discussions of Lyotard and Foucault to Raymond Chandler or Laurie Anderson, often in rapid succession, is remarkable. The vitality of this constant movement is sometimes dizzying. The feeling of loss reflected in Jameson’s obituaries tells us how much that wild ride will be missed.

 Engaged readers of Jameson can feasibly follow paths through his work in a kind of “choose your own Jameson” adventure. With so many dialectical connections available from any one starting point, readers whether coming from a Marxist or non-Marxist perspective may arrive at something like their own personal Jameson.

Certainly, the published remembrances suggest that quite a few folks coming from different worlds have found their Jameson.

Notes

1. Kate Wagner, “The Gifts of Fredric Jameson (1934-2024)” The Nation, September 26, 2024.
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2. A.O. Scott, “For Fredric Jameson, Marxist Criticism was a Labor of Love,” The New York Times, September 26, 2024.
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3. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 10.
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4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
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5. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 10.
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6. Jameson, Postmodernism…, ix.
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7. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Polity: 1991).
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8. Jameson, Postmodernism…, 297.
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9. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London & New York: Verso, 1998). 47-78.
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10. Douglas Kellner, “Introduction: Jameson, Marxism, Postmodernism” in Postmodernism: Jameson: Critique (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press 1989), 2.
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11. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London & New York: Verso, 1991) 5.
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12. Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in The Essential Marcuse, edited by Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), 212.
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13. Ibid, 419.
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14. Fredric Jameson, Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism edited by Ian Buchanan (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007, 85.
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15. Ibid, 142.
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16. Postmodernism…, 413.
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17. Ibid, 54.
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18. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995) 78-79.
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19. Ibid, 79.
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20. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974) 110-111.
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21. This is the condensed version Mark Fisher gives in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London & Washington D.C.: Zero Books, 2009) 2. Fisher attributes the remark to both Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. Jameson’s own words from The Seeds of Time (1994) are “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” He also writes enigmatically, in “Future City,” “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” (New Left Review 21 May-June 2003, 97 also found in The Ideologies of Theory, 573). He repeats the latter line in “An American Utopia” (2016), 3.
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22. Jameson, Archaeologies…, xii.
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23. Ibid, 345.
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24. Jameson, Postmodernism…, 355.
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25. Fredric Jameson, “An American Utopia,” in An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, edited by Slavoj Žižek (London & New York, 2016).
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26. Fredric Jameson, “Foreword” to Darko Suvin, Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015) xxi.
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27. Jameson, Marxism and Form, 306.
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May-June 2025, ATC 236