Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (review)

Darren Jorgensen

symploke, Volume 15, Numbers 1-2, 2007, pp. 396-398 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska PressDOI: 10.1353/sym.0.0022

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396 Book Notes

content. Moreover, even the paradoxes of the early Žižek are not the content of his discourse but represent a refined rhetoric for evoking the Lacanian Real, a register of existence that resists signification absolutely and so can only be approached through those moments in which the Symbolic systematically fails to disambiguate itself.

In the end, one may agree or disagree with Žižek’s rehabilitation of a muscular Christianity in the name of dialectical materialism, but to reduce this peculiar conjunction of thought to pure paradox is to conflate rhetorical gesture with the object of analysis. Of course, the two levels can never be completely disentangled, and every field of discourse creates its own object of analysis. But to say that a discourse and its object are one and the same is to commit a vulgar error. Sophocles’ Antigone may no longer be completely separable from the terms of Lacan’s reading of it in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, but both he and Žižek would be the last people to claim it has no existence outside that discourse per se. Likewise to say that Lacan’s unconscious is textual because he uses graphs to formalize it is to conflate signifier, signified, and referent in a most elementary way.

Paul Allen Miller, University of South Carolina Ian Buchanan. Fredric Jameson: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2007. 152 pp.

One of the most influential theorists of literature, culture, and theory itself, Fredric Jameson has only recently been the subject of the book-length authorial studies we expect to surround such major figures of the intellectual scene. It may well be that the sheer complexity of Jameson’s work, unfolding over the decades, has confounded previous attempts at such projects. The various discourses into which Jameson has intervened requires an exhaustive knowledge of these different debates, whose significance only becomes clear in retrospect. It is difficult to look past the triad of theoretical blockbusters Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981), and Postmodernism (1991) in any account of Jameson’s work, and they serve here as navigation markers in the ocean of Jameson’s production. The problem for any appraisal of Jameson lies in their evident difference, in the ways in which they employ very different strategies to address very different subjects.

The quality of Ian Buchanan’s book is to identify these changing method-ologies, to discover in an aside on causality here or a book on Brecht there the most persistent of Jameson’s interpretive tools and working models. The enduring tropes of reflexivity, historical determinism, allegory, interpretation, periodisation, and the cultural dominant are some of the keys to Jameson’s heady blend of Marxism and theory. Unlike so many other authorial studies, Buchanan is not concerned with reconciling these with each other, and thus with the singularity of Jameson, but instead to account for the initial possibility of thinking them together. The ways in which this or that distinctive constellation of meaning is revealed as a part of some greater ideological operation is the Jamesonian effect. Buchanan describes that way that it comes to us as an experience of shock on the level of the sentence. Such epiphanies will be familiar to readers of Jameson, as the juxtaposition of unlike elements mediates the

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fragments of lived cultural reality with history. Bridging the sentences with the strategy, Buchanan helps us come closer to thinking the continuities that we have come to expect from a major thinker.

This mediation of the molar and molecular marks Buchanan’s book from previous apprehensions of Jameson’s oeuvre, that have so often become lost in stylistics or been seduced by the debates that have followed in his wake. Buchanan’s is instead a sympathetic account, in the mode of Geoffrey Bennington’s Lyotard: Writing the Event (1988), or Rex Butler’s seminal Jean Baudrillard: The Defense of the Real (1999). The intimacy these writers have with the theorists they discuss verges on identification, such that Butler did not know whether he had in the process of writing become Baudrillard, and Buchanan’s lengthy sentences come to resemble Jameson’s. Buchanan’s distillation of causality, the dialectic, figuration, metacommentary, and cognitive mapping are the most exacting we possess, because they reveal through identification the force of their logic. They are attuned to the sense such strategies make in situation, of how they can be assembled into a dialectical conception of history. If there is a larger continuity to Jameson’s oeuvre, it lies in this dialectical sentence, a shift from the specific to the general that takes place from phrase to phrase. Buchanan works to demystify the perplexing obscurities of the dialectic, to make its operation comprehensible and useful.

Much of the originality of Buchanan’s account here lies in a chapter that maps Jameson’s influences, in Sartre, Adorno, Barthes, and Brecht. Here lies cause for complaint, as one might include or exclude any number of antecedents for Jameson’s work. Lukács and Bloch are also significant figures for under-standing this oeuvre, especially in understanding the strategies of totalisation and utopia. Barthes is an unusual addition to these Marxist theorists, but Buchanan makes a case for this author’s ideas on refunctioning and pleasure that could alone lead to a reassessment of his place in a political history of theory. The fascinating transcodings between this generation of theorists and Jameson’s own is also the subject of a rare biographical interview. Such concluding interviews are a signature of Continuum’s Live Theory series. Unsurprisingly, Jameson’s personal history blurs into the history of the left, in a revisitation of the Cold War that inevitably brings up the question of the place of the left and theory amidst globalization. Buchanan concludes his book with a view to refashioning the corpus of Jameson’s intellectual armoury to enact a speedy deconstruction of this term and the powers that have determined its cultural dominance.

What is striking about Buchanan’s account of Jameson’s place in the history of theory is the degree of forgetting that necessitates his revision. The series of theory wars that occasioned Jameson’s rise to prominence in the academy, from the introduction of Adorno, Bloch, and even Benjamin to English speakers, to the controversy over “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1983), are today the territory of specialists. A new generation of scholars are coming of age without the requisite knowledge of Marxism and even cultural studies or postmodernism that once centrally situated Jameson’s work. The deeper lesson of Buchanan’s book may well lie in mapping the continuities of this past to the globalizing present, as Jameson’s tools for dismantling the engine of history lie dormant in debates that are often as difficult and complex as the history of the twentieth century itself. In Buchanan’s hands the so-called victory of capitalism points not to the economic inevitability of this system, but instead reveals the sense of a

398 Book Notes

dialectical Marxism that has specialised in exposing its intricate complexities. As he points out, the further capitalism progresses in embedding itself as a world-system, the more relevant Jameson becomes to thinking the intricacies of this system.

Darren Jorgensen, University of Western Australia Michael Ruse. Darwinism and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. 326 pp.

Biology is hot, as all informed people will have noticed, due not only to a creationist resurgence, nor only to stunning scientific developments since the discovery of DNA. The creationist controversy and genetic engineering get the biggest headlines, but biology’s in-house debates about evolution are showing equally significant philosophical resonance: about the reducibility of biology to physics, about the explanatory adequacy of natural selection, about the propor-tionate influence and nature and nurture, and even about the nature of science itself. Not since the Scopes trial has the power and scope of philosophical naturalism been so much in question, yielding a burgeoning literature ranging from the popular to the academic. In that literature, the works of Michael Ruse (philosopher and historian of science) address a remarkably wide audience with scholarly literacy and a writing style notable for its lucidity and wit.

Darwinism and Its Discontents is Ruse’s most comprehensive look at Darwin-ism to date. Beginning with historical background (chapter 1), he establishes the core “fact of evolution” (chapter 2), and proceeds with chapter-length accounts of the sorts of problems that test the limits of Darwinian theory: the origin of life, the path of evolution, the cause of evolution, and human nature. He devotes a chapter to the “limitations and restrictions” of Darwinism (chapter 6), while chapters 8 through 12 examine the wider issues that cluster about cultural landmarks and ideological flashpoints: factuality, professional honesty, philosophy, literature, and religion. Ruse is well suited to such an overview. He negotiates the terrains of history, philosophy, and theology well enough to offer cogent versions of the central issues and their multiple sides.

Ruse’s own perspective is ultimately a pro-scientific agnosticism. But he knows enough theology to recognize which theological arguments are more consistent with science and which hold up better to philosophical scrutiny so that his approach never degenerates into a brief for science-as-such against religion-as-such. In his treatment of the faith-science issue, for instance, Ruse effectively uses the theological arguments of Ernan McMullin (a catholic priest) against fundamentalist arguments that dismiss natural evolution in favor of miracles, showing the latter hostage to a faith in biblical literalism and inerrancy that leave scientific arguments untouched. Similarly, Ruse shows how the recently christened Intelligent Design movement not only inhibits science by accepting its current gaps as final, but also raises embarrassing theological questions about the features of nature that seem not so intelligent at best, and cruel at worst.

Ruse’s view of science might be called a methodologically prudent naturalism. That view is doubly provisional: first, by provisionally assuming that natural science’s methods are adequate to explain nature; second, by