Thread by @TheLitCritGuy

On Fredric Jameson and Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, a thread.
#TheoryTime

Jameson begins with what he admits is a strong claim - namely, that of the centrality of the political to literary interpretation.

Thus, Jameson goes beyond the modest claim that certain texts have social and historical, even political, resonances.

However, those resonances, be they historical, social or political do not produce interpretations of texts but rather shape the preconditions of interpretation as such.

In contrast to what Jameson calls an antiquarian approach to literary history comes "the tendency of much contemporary theory to rewrite selected texts from the past in terms of its own aesthetic."

In both of these approaches Jameson sees what he terms 'the problem of historicism.'

Genuine philosophies of history are thin on the ground though probably one of the most influential from the past is the great hermenutic systems of Christianity (see Augustine's City of God)

So, what system is workable now? Well...

If you accept Jameson's point about Marxism, the divide between texts which are social and those which are political is not just an error but a symptom of "the reification and privatization of contemporary life."

The consequences of this divide are something which Jameson takes extremely seriously too - seeing it as having dire results:

The only way out of this false divide begins with the recognition that "there is nothing that is not social and historical - indeed, that everything is "in the last analysis" political."

To put it another way, Jameson argues that his work is proposing an anti-transcendent hermenutic model.

After a brief detour via Althusser, Jameson moves on to talking about the nature of cause and effect - a vital issue for understanding the relationship of cultural texts with history.

Firstly comes the model of "mechanical causality" - what Jameson calls the billiard ball model of cause and effect is still present in cultural analysis with work like McLuhan's work on technological determinism

This model of causality is, Jameson argues, locally valid - there is, after all a clear relationship between the end of the 3 volume novel and the beginning of the single volume novel and 'the modification of the inner form of the novel itself.'

As Jameson explains, these formal external changes must alter how we read and interpret:

(I don't want to get too bogged down in Jameson's response to Althusser so jumping ahead a little, Jameson then turns to the hermenutic systems of medieval Christianity)

Jameson here outlining some of the levels at work in the interpretation of Scripture:

Continuing the theological example, in the contemporary instance a particular collective history (the story of the people of Israel) is reduced to a single individual - namely the details of the life of Christ.

Yet, this "reduction" does not limit the text but generates two further levels of interpretation - moral and analogical. It is precisely through moral and analogical interpretation that the text becomes a "machinery for ideological investment."

Jameson, on the 4 levels and contemporary interpretation:

Jumping forward a little, Jameson moves to Lukacs' essay on realism which serves as an example of the ways in which the literary texts is treated as an allegorical model of society as a whole with characters being read as typifications of societal elements.

And here, extending the allegorical model of interpretation, we return to Marxism and a Marxist conception of history:

Here you start to see the extent of what Jameson's critical project is aiming for and the extent to which Jamesonian criticism requires the broadest possible scope:

Jameson's critique of Althusser is essentially that his structuralism only has one structure within it - namely the mode of production.

I think I'll have to stop there. Either that or try and find a way to talk about greimas squares and advanced semiotics 280 characters at a time.