The Horizons of Theory: Jameson, Marxism, and Poststructuralism Essay

The Horizons of Theory Jameson, Marxism, and PoststructuralismFredric Jamesons The Political unconscious is a performance which crosses theories boundaries, which walks (or polices?) Marxisms border on poststructuralism. It may easily be read as a refutation of poststructuralism, or as an embrace of it as a flight from Marxism (though under its own banner), or as its divinatory buyback this is not a contradiction in terms (we might read Jameson as resulting), exactly a dialectical, productive exploration of the tension between these philosophies. Indeed, Jamesons exposition of his bolshie hermeneutic may be taken as a reply (from within a discourse he perceives as Marxism) to the poststructuralisms of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, and as a conversation with the structural Marxism he calls Althusserian but Jameson attempts to reconcile these views with the red tradition. We may read The Political Unconscious as positing a mode of tuition which is acceptable to or which subsumes both a demystifying Marxism and the aporia or irreducible contradiction of deconstruction but in so doing, as Jameson perhaps realizes, the textbook is drawn into the clear contradictions between these theories, and only initiateially resolves (or evades) them.The central dissertation of The Political Unconscious is the presence of History as the untranscendable or secure horizon of all reading and all interpretation (17). We may now note that this untranscendable presence apparently contradicts deconstructions mistrust of all presences within and so-and-so texts, to say nothing of Derridas derisive references to transcendence. To look for History in the text, to baring the hidden meaning of History through it, would evidently not be a sa... ...rificing the individual text to a broader structural analysis that a Marxist cultural study can hope to play its part in political praxis, which remains, of course, what Marxism is all about (299). It is revealing (from a Ma rxist standpoint) that this final aside marks the only reference to concrete political involvement in the volume perhaps more tellingly, The Political Unconscious treats this sacrifice of the traditional, individualistic literary text as a damage which, however unfortunately, must be paid (in order to satisfy the demands of Marxism). save as a reconciliation of the poststructuralist, anti-transcendent insistence on specificity with some of the theoretical imperatives of Marxist cultural thought, The Political Unconscious remains a breakthrough and as a proposal of a newly political, poststructuralist historicism, it is undeniably persuasive.