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.For manypeople the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the changes in the formerSoviet Union are understood as a more general discrediting of all the ideasassociated with the name of Marx; and into this climate of opinion we seetwo things happening.On the one hand, some Marxist critics becomemore hard-line in their Marxist affiliations, insisting that Marxism hasbeen discredited in the popular imagination because it has drifted too farfrom the true creed.On the other hand, there are critics whose work adaptsMarx to the times.In Britain in the 1990s this drama was played out in thesocialist Labour Party; old-school party members insisted that the partyhad been out of power for decades because it was insufficiently socialist,and modernisers struggled to create what they called  New Labour ,148 AFTER JAMESONwhere the Marxist origins of the party were reconfigured to take accountof the logics of contemporary capitalism (the modernisers, under TonyBlair, eventually won the day).We see something similar in thereputation of Fredric Jameson.The Marxist thinker Alex Callinicos hasattacked much of Jamesonian postmodernism, amongst other things, ina book entitled Against Postmodernism (1989).Postmodernism isflawed and dangerous, Callinicos thinks, because it  lacks a referent inthe social world.As far as Callinicos is concerned, Jameson haseffectively sold out his Marxist beliefs by moving away from the beliefin Marxism as a socially revolutionary mode of thinking.Old styleMarxists still believe that a workers revolution is the best way tooverturn the evils of capitalism.Callinicos argues that  postmodernismrepresents a turning away from that revolutionary ideal, as well as beinga depressing symptom of our fallen age.Socialist revolution is the outcome of historical process at work throughoutthe present century.Postmodernity by contrast is merely a theoreticalconstruct, of interest primarily as a symptom of the current mood of theWestern intelligentsia.Not only does belief in a postmodern epoch usuallygo along with rejection of socialist revolution as either feasible or desirable,but it is the perceived failure of revolution which has helped to gainwidespread acceptance of this belief.(Callinicos 1989:1)In slightly gentler mood, Terry Eagleton chides Jameson as representingthe  academicisation of what for earlier Marxists  had been a mode ofpolitical intervention.Eagleton insists this is not  a cheap gibe atarmchair Marxists and concedes that  it is preferable for radical ideas tosurvive in an armchair than to go under altogether , but it is hard to shakethe sense that Jameson is blamed not merely for abstaining fromrevolutionary social intervention himself, but for writing criticism thatdiscourages others from believing in revolution (Eagleton and Milne1996: 12).Other Marxist critics have seen in Jameson s versions of Marxism thechance to breath new life into that system of belief.Perry Andersonadmits that  in the past, Jameson s writing was sometimes taxed withbeing insufficiently engaged with the real world of material conflicts class struggles and national risings  and so held  unpolitical.That wasalways a misreading of this unwaveringly committed thinker(Anderson 1998: 136).For Anderson, Jameson is central to therevivification of left-wing political thought, in part, precisely because hisanatomy of the current condition of culture, postmodernism, has been soprecise and incisive.A younger critic, Clint Burnham, is even more unashamedlyenthusiastic about the impact Jameson has had. I cannot remember nothaving read Jameson , he declares, so ubiquitous has Jameson s workbeen in his own intellectual development (Burnham 1995: 243).According to Burnham, Jameson has created something he calls  MTVMarxism : a hip, trendy new Marxism that encompasses popular cultureas well as hard theoretical writing. MTV Marxism means more thanthat Jameson s postmodernism sees the demotic, popular models ofculture as paradigmatic; it has to do with the excitement with whichJameson s work has been received in some quarters.I would argue that many intellectuals of my generation read the work ofJameson.as mass culture; by my generation I suppose I mean those bornin the late-fifties or sixties.My point is that in this milieu, Jameson [is] on thesame plane as Shabba Ranks and PJ Harvey and Deep Space Nine and JohnWoo: cultural signifiers of which one is a much as  fan as a  critic.(Burnham 1995: 244) MTV Marxism , as its name suggests, is posited as a more massmarket,popular form of Marxism than the more desiccated forms associated withother theorists.JAMESONIAN POSTMODERNISMAs this suggests, it is Jameson s interventions in the debates surroundingpostmodernity that have had the most profound and most recent impactson the debates of theory in the west.In particular, Jamesonian ideas ofpostmodernity as the populist, fractured cultural logic of late capitalismhave generated a great deal of debate; and his distinction between parody and  pastiche has been taken up by many other theorists.InPerry Andersen s uncharacteristically colourful phrase:  exploding likeso many magnesium flares in the night sky, Fredric Jameson s writingsAFTER JAMESON 149150 AFTER JAMESONhave lit up the shrouded landscape of the postmodern (CT: xi).As wesaw in Chapter 6, there have been a great many conflicting criticalinterpretations of what postmodernism even is, but generally speakingthere are two readings of the logic of contemporary culture.One is aLyotardian or Hassanian postmodernism, which sees postmodern art asa continuation of modernism, as characterised by a rather austere avant-garde aesthetic of resistance and fragmentation.On the other hand thereis the Jamesonian postmodernism that Chapter 6 examined, which seescontemporary culture in other terms: as an eruption of a the popular intothe arena of high art which is energetic and exciting as well as being insome senses problematic; as the expression of a very particular social andeconomic set of circumstances rather than a trans-historical culturalstyle.It is fair to say, I think, that the Jamesonian postmodernism is themore widely cited and employed one; whole areas of study, particularlythe burgeoning academic fields of Cultural Studies and Media Arts, drawon Jameson s insights into the way postmodernism is an energeticallypopular phenomenon.One of the most influential strategies of readingthat Jameson established is the one that sees useful resistances andradical value in texts other critics might dismiss as crudely ideological orcomplicit with the system.We saw how he was able to find interestingthings to say about even so right-wing a writer as Wyndham Lewis inFables of Aggression.Similarly, he is able to read populist films likeJaws and The Godfather in radical ways, since there is a  transcendentelement in  even the most degraded type of mass culture which is ableto be  negative and critical of the social order from which, as a productand commodity, it springs (SV: 29) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]