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Jameson's Adorno, or, the Persistence of the UtopianAuthor(s):
John PizerSource: New German Critique, No. 58 (Winter, 1993), pp.
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Jameson's Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Utopian
John Pizer
Fredric Jameson's 1990 monograph on Theodor W. Adomo, Late
Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic has generally
met with harsh criticism ever since it first appeared. Peter
Osborne's article, published recently in this journal, takes
Jameson to task for willfully misappropriating and talsely
characterizing Adomo's dominant epis- temological categories
(non-identity, mimesis, natural history, etc.) in the service of a
single-minded attack on poststructuralist thought. In attempting to
translate these conceptual constellations into an ideolect useful
to his own unique project of creating a postmodemist Marxism,
Jameson misconstrues Adorno's dialectic. As this negative dialectic
was inscribed with a resistance to the sort of hegemonic programs
es- poused by theorists such as Jameson, Jameson's attempted
assimila- tion of Adorno to his particular priorities ironically
acts to undercut his own theoretical premises.' In earlier reviews,
Eva Geulen accused Jame- son of suppressing Adorno's conscious
employment of a fragmentary writing style and his positing of
unresolvable antinomies, a suppression motivated by Late Marxism's
striving after totalities,2 and Robert Hullot- Kentor launched a
blistering sarcastic attack against what he believes is Jameson's
facile "commonsensicalness" in this book, an approach inca- pable
of articulating Adorno's immanent critical method.3
The antagonism directed against Jameson's book by these and
other
1. Peter Osborne, "A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson's
Adorno," New Ger- man Critique 56 (Spring/Summer 1992): 171-92.
2. Eva Geulen, "A Matter of Tradition," Telos 89 (Fall 1991):
155-66 3. Robert Hullot-Kentor, "Suggested Reading: Jameson on
Adorno," Telos 89 (Fall
1991): 167-77.
127
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128 Jameson's Adorno
Adorno scholars is far from untounded. Jameson's relation to
Adorno is itself marked by a rather antagonistic form of influence,
and thus Late Marxism must inevitably provoke displeasure in
Adorno's adherents. The purpose of my article is not primarily to
defend Jameson against these attacks, nor to add my voice to the
critical chorus, although I would say that one should not expect
dispassionate scholarly analysis from a writer such as Jameson,
with his own strongly demarcated theoretical and polit- ical
agenda. This agenda is consistent with the book's central premise,
namely, that Adorno was tundamentally a Marxist theoretician. If
one was to study Adorno's oeuvre without prior reference to the
voluminous secondary literature of which Adorno has been the focus
in the last two decades, this proposition might seem rather
obvious. However, many interpreters have attempted to transform
Adorno into a late "Young He- gelian," a neo-poststructuralist, a
forerunner of new historicism, or what- ever else might fit
someone's own particular critical priority. Jameson's book is in
large measure a dialogue with and a retutation of these
writers.
One of Jameson's own most persistent critical priorities has
been the elucidation of the utopian. It is perhaps the domain (or
sphere of ideolo- gical discourse) most powerfully and frequently
exercised in his work. My essay seeks to demonstrate that Adorno
has consistently played the key (albeit largely hidden and
conflicted) role in Jameson's treatment of this domain. Jameson's
articulation of the utopian is closely related to his nearly
instinctual tendency to analyze discursive realms as totalities,
and here, too, Adorno's role is "critical" in both senses of the
term; it is both seminal and largely oppositional. As Cornel West
has noted:
Adorno presents Jameson with his most formidable challenge, for
Adorno's delicate dialectical acrobatics embark on the quest for
totalization while simultaneously calling such a quest into ques-
tion; theyv reconstruct the part in light of the whole; they devise
a complex conception of mediation while disclosing the idea of to-
talitv as illusion; and they ultimately promote dialectical
develop- ment while surrendering to bleak pessimism about ever
attaining a desirable telos. In short, Adorno is a negative
hermeneutical thinker, a dialectical deconstructionist par
excellence: the skeleton that forever hangs in Jameson's
closet.4
West's analysis trenchantly summarizes the way in which
Adorno's
4. Cornel West, "Ethics and Action in Fredric Jameson's Marxist
Hermeneutics," Postmodernism and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 125.
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John Pizer 129
thought constitutes the chief obstacle to Jameson's attempted
evoca- tion of totalities. But West fails to note the tremendously
productive results of Adorno's challenge; it is precisely Adorno's
sobering influence which prevents Jameson from engaging in the
"utopianism gone mad" West mistakenly identifies in his work.5 We
will see that Jameson's Adorno reception yields insights not merely
into his own complex views on the utopian, but into the thought of
Adorno as well. While Jameson's formulations of utopia and totality
are enriched and problematized through the mediation of Adorno,
Adorno's own posi- tions on these constructs are shown in Jameson's
reading to be more complex and ambivalent than most of his
interpreters have realized. For example, Jameson's unique
perspectives will allow us to see Martin Jay's assertion that
"totality" for Adorno "is retained only as a term of oppro- brium
to indicate the pervasive domination of power relations that can
only be challenged on the local and particular level,"6 an
assertion not unusual in Adorno scholarship, as an
oversimplification.
Jameson's first in-depth analysis of Adorno's thought is to be
found in his essay "T. W. Adorno; or, Historical Tropes," which
originally ap- peared in the Spring 1967 issue of Salmagundi, but
is better known as the introductory essay toJameson's book Marxism
and Form (1971). The opening line of this essay pithily evokes the
dilemma which has consis- tently compelled Jameson's quest to
identify the utopian, collective impulse in the realm of art,
namely, its virtual absence from the con- temporary, socio-
political sphere: "To whom can one present a writer whose principal
subject is the disappearance of the public?" (MF 3).7
5. West 140. West objects to Jameson's association, in The
Political Unconscious, of even upper class solidarity with
collective, utopian impulses, seeing therein a horribly misguided
optimism. ButJameson's identification of a utopian collectivity in
the class consciousness of the privileged and powerful is not a
reflection of optimism. He mere- ly attempts to establish a
striking and unexpected (i.e. dialectically mediated) genealo- gy,
in the manner of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Adorno.
6. Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual
Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia UP) 135.
7. References to Jameson's books are given parenthetically in
the text. MF = Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical
Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971); PH = The
Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and
Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972); FA = Fables of
Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1979); PU = The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Social- lv Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981); Essays 1 = The
Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971- 1986 Volume 1: Situations of
Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988); Essays 2 = The
Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986. Volume 2: The Syntax of
History (Minneapolis: U of Min- nesota P, 1988); LM = Late Marxism:
Adorno, or. The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990);
PM = Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism(Durham: Duke UP, 1991).
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130 Jameson's Adorno
By "the public," Jameson would signify a communal totality, a
cohe- sive group drawn together by mutual affiliations. His sense
of the loss of such a public is even more pronounced in his book,
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic oJ Late Capitalism (1991),
where the classes which had heretofore constituted specific public
domains are shown to have dissolved (at least in the United States,
and, to some degree, in the Western world in general) into a
plethora of highly disparate micro- political interest groups.
Particularly among composers (and it is Adorno's writing on
music which serves as the focus oftJameson's early essay), Adorno
saw a simi- lar dissolution of class distinctions. Earlier class
distinctions had led to collective production, in contrast to the
individualism oft composers in the Schonberg era. But this
homogenization of the classes can in no way obviate the endangered
social position of the composer, who is in- creasingly cut off from
societal wealth.8 The reason for the composers' growing
impoverishment seems to lie in that vanishing of a coherent and
identifiable public which Jameson sees as constituting the basic
theme of Adorno's work. Adorno's pessimism as to the results of
this disappearance, not unlike Jameson's, is tied in his work
largely to the evisceration of collective social memory and
historical consciousness through the process of reification in late
capitalism.9 It serves to spur Jameson (as it did Benjamin in the
phenomenal world, to Adorno's ulti- mate irritation) to identity
the traces of social coherence and totality wherever he can find
them; this is the basis of West's objection to Jameson's
praxis.
Adorno objects to the articulation of a social totality because
he as- sociates this concept with identitarian thinking. As Jameson
himself remarks, Adorno's negative dialectic claims that "the whole
is the untrue" (PU 54). It is untrue with respect to the social
because it pre- supposes a false telos, a chimeric end point in
history toward which the collective is seen, reductively, to move.
Adorno emphatically rejected the Hegelian principle of expressive
totality, prompted by Lukdics and
8. Theodor W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: Zwdlf
theoretische Vorlesungen (Munich: Rowohlt, 1968) 198-99.
9. This process, and this "late" phase of capitalism, are
identified by Adorno as al- ready predominant in the late
nineteenth century. See, for example, his essay "lOber epische
Naivet&" in Noten zur Literatur I (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp,
1980) 50-60. In his 1977 essay "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,"
Jameson judges the Frankfurt School's convincing analysis of the
variegated instrumentalities through which the subject be- comes
reified under late capitalism to be its "lasting achievement"
(Essays 1, 109).
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John Pizer 131
most other left Hegelians, for its positing of a meta-subject
which makes reality a totality, and thus reduces its discrete
phenomena to mere sub-elements in an identitarian
ever-the-same.
This rejection of the meta-subject as the agent of social
totality leads Adorno, in the Negative Dialektik (1966), to
question the ideology behind the postulation of a "progressive
class."'0 As Susan Buck-Morss has not- ed, Adorno lelt the
individual microcosmically mirrored the social totali- ty, but
disputed social analyses by both the left and the right when the
ar- ticulation of such a whole itself became a critical focus. The
"collective" as a concept is too closely imbricated with the
commodity character of bourgeois society, a character which (as
Luk~ics indicated and as Adorno concurred), constitutes this
society's "objective reality.""1 Such views inevitably pose a
dilemma for Jameson, for whom the evocation of the social
collective, or at least a communal totality, is virtually
synonymous with the utopian moment in the aesthetic realm.
Nevertheless, it is in the aesthetic realm that Jameson and
Adorno may be said to meet. For particularly in modem music, Adomo
sustains the notion of aesthetic totality as a mode of resistance
to social and ma- terial totality. The "integral technique" of
modern musical compo- sition poses through its objective character
a moment of resolute op- position to the integral state, and helps
to absorb the tear generated by the social totality in this, its
concrete, philosophical, objectively exist- ent character.12 This
reassurance helps the subject to "win back its self-
determination."'s For Jameson as well, the artwork constitutes the
locus of subjective integrity and empowerment. However, here too
there is a frisson between Adorno and Jameson. For while Jameson
analyses lit- erary works in The Political Unconscious (1981) in
terms of their concrete visions of projected utopian moments, as
sites of embedded utopian images which he attempts to distill,
Adorno's consistent reservations concerning the utopian are closely
related to his adherence to a Bilder- verbot, his disinclination to
see the utopian evoked directly (without criti- cal intervention)
through aesthetic representations. As we will see, Adorno believed
that the moment of freedom embedded in the utopian
10. Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from
Lukdcs to Habermas (Berke- ley: U of California P, 1984) 259.
11. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor
W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York:
Free Press, 1977) 28 and 58. 12. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen
Musik (1949, rpt.Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1978)
125. 13. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, 113.
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132 Jameson's Adorno
can only be grasped through determinate negation. Determinate
nega- tion, the practice of elucidating the specific antinomies in
aesthetic and social phenomena, alone allows art to achieve its
(utopian) projection of reconciliation; this is a central postulate
of Adorno's Asthetische Theorie (1970). These differences
inevitably burden Jameson with great diffi- culties in his attempt
to adapt Adorno to his own utopian project.
Jameson's essay on Adorno in Marxism and Form is most famous for
its characterization of the Negative Dialektik as "in the long run
a mas- sive failure" (MF 58), ajudgment he would come to modify.
Jameson's indictment stems at least partially from his early view
of Adorno as a distinctly anti-utopian thinker (though, in the same
breath with which he terms Adorno's magnum opus a failure, he
cannot resist seeing it as indicative "of that genuine totality of
thought which Adorno's works taken as a whole embody" [MF 58]).
This is not to say that Jameson, in this early analysis, finds no
trace of the utopian in Adorno's thought. He perceives in Adorno's
well-known projection of a conceivable sub- ject-object
reconciliation a construct which could regress into a naive
utopianism if transposed into the historical plane. However,
Jameson argues that Adorno obviates this possibility by situating
his concept of Versohnung (albeit diachronically, in connection
with the personage of Beethoven) in the domain of art (MF
38-39).
Other essays in Marxism and Form discern a utopian impulse in
figures as disparate as Schiller, LukAcs, Breton, Bloch, Benjamin
and Marcuse. But Jameson sees Adorno's constant awareness of
reification and con- tradiction in artistic production in the
present age as blocking the gen- uine evocation of the utopian even
in his aesthetic writings. He implies that this is a critical
failure in Adorno's thought, for Marxism and Form views the utopian
as a fundamentally negational principle. The utopian is an
allegorical frame which itself allegorizes the world and allows us
to see the massive totality of the here and now as not fixed and
final, but subject to dialectical reversal through imaginative
aesthetic projec- tion. Particularly Ernst Bloch causes Jameson to
see the utopian mo- ment as structured by allegory, for the utopian
can never express itself directly. It calls on the subject for
creative contemplation, according to Bloch's aesthetic (MF 142).
Such an endeavor is not to be seen as a form of escapism, but as a
means to perceive the labile and contingent character of current
social reality.
Although Jameson regards Adorno's discoveries concerning the
all- encompassing reitication of the subject in the age of late
capitalism as his signal achievement, he believes such a desultory
preoccupation
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John Pizer 133
blocks the potential for a genuinely liberating "negative
dialectic," in the form of utopian allegory, from realizing itself
in Adorno's book. It can only negate the negative and contradict
the contradictory, thus becom- ing at once reductive, fragmenting
and tautological (see esp. MF 56-59).
In spite of Marxism and Form's ultimate condemnation of Adorno's
late work for its supposed failure to see the emancipatory
potential of the utopian allegoric, Jameson was aware early on that
the utopian im- pulse was a significant component of Adorno's
thought. In the 1977 es- say "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan," for
example, he spoke of the construction by Adorno and Horkheimer of
"a new Utopian vision of bonheur and instinctual gratification"
(Essays 1, 79). Libidinal fulfillment plays a constitutive role in
Jameson's own articulation of utopian struc- tures in works of art
as well, particularly in such modern genres as sci- ence fiction
(MF 405-07 and Essays 1, 14-16). But Jameson goes on to note that
"the Frankfurt School's powerfiul vision of a liberated collective
culture tends to leave little space for the unique histories - both
psychic and social - of individual subjects" (Essays 1, 80).
Marxism and Form would lead us to believe that the blame for this
failing should not be laid at the feet of the Frankfurt School, but
must be regarded as rooted in a general epistemological aporia of
modernity, when and where the discontinuity between individual and
collective experience is height- ened to such a degree that it is
surmounted only in the artistic utopian vision itself.14
There is nevertheless a significant disjunction in the works of
Jameson and Adorno with regard to the individual in his/her
relationship to the collective totality in a projected utopian
realm. Drawing on sources as diverse as Althusser's and Lacan's
constellations of the Imaginary, Habermas' communicational models
and (through dialectical reversal) Thomas More's dystopian
pessimism, Jameson has consistently attempted to conceptualize the
promise of a collectivity which liberates the indi- vidual,
allowing him or her the freedom to pursue genuine self-tulfill-
ment. For Adorno, "freedom can only be grasped in determinate ne-
gation, in accordance with the concrete shape of unfreedom."'5 This
is
14. However, he felt Sartre was able to make a cognitive "leap"
between the two realms. See MF 347.
15. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1970)
228. Adorno is more pessimistic than Jameson as regards the
dissolution of the discrete subject in the age of late capitalism.
See Hans-Hartmut Kappner, "Adomos Reflexionen fiber den Zerfall des
biirgerlichen Individuums," Text + Kritik. Sonderband: Theodor W
Adorno, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1977)
44-63.
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134 Jameson's Adorno
an example of the contemporaneously synthesizing and
self-canceling operations, and the destructive but also
sell-destructive treatment of hypostatic concepts Marxism and Form
tound so deeply troubling (albeit fascinating) in Negative
Dialektik. Undoubtedly, Adorno's elision of indi- vidual freedom
from the (rare) moments of utopian consciousness in this work
played a major role in creating Jameson's early discomfort with
it.
Jameson's next major work, The Prison-House of Language (1972),
con- tains few direct references to Adorno, as it is concerned
almost exclu- sively with the developmental tendencies of the
Russian formalist and structuralist movements. Nevertheless,
striking assertions in this book which one might find somewhat odd
it not regarded as fully consistent and integral to his praxis,
such as his comment that "structuralism may be understood as a
distorted awareness of the dawning collective character of life"
(PH 196), are valuable in their demonstration of a continuity, and
further development, in Jameson's ongoing constella- tion of the
utopian, the collective, and the totality. Jameson's search for a
reconciliation of synchronic, diachronic and hermeneutic planes in
the structuralist enterprise at the conclusion to this book
indicates his striving for totality even as a technique of critical
thought itself (PH 214-16). The attainment of such a comprehensive
methodology would naturally subtend an insight into the often
invisible nexus extrinsically and intrinsically linking the
socio-economic sphere to the cultural-aes- thetic domain (the
"base" in its relationship to the "superstructure"), and would see
the work of art as a synchronic register of its political and
historical site of origin.
Both Jameson and Adorno are even more resolute than LukAcs in
their pursuit of such interdisciplinary associations. With regard
to Jameson, this tendency first becomes strikingly manifest in his
next major book, The Political Unconscious (1981). But the profound
influence Adorno exercised on this work is actually indicated by a
passage at the outset of the Adorno essay in Marxism and Form:
(Thus) the full-scale study of superstructures, the construction
of the historical trope, not to lyrical but rather to extended and
epic proportions, presupposes a transcendence of the atomistic
nature of the cultural term: it is essentially the difference
between the jux- taposition of an individual novel against its
socio-economic back- ground, and the history of the novel seen
against this same back- ground. (MF 9-10, Jameson's emphasis)
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John Pizer 135
This insight is inspired by Jameson's reading of Adorno's
Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949), in which he admires the
bringing into play of "a network of cross-relationships" drawn from
seemingly disparate dis- cursivities (MF 8). His subsequent remark
shows he quickly grasped the possibilities of creating such a
network in the domain of the theory of the novel, and this
possibility was realized some fourteen years later in The Political
Unconscious.
In between Marxism and Form and The Political Unconscious,
Jameson published a book probably more familiar, because of its
restricted topic, to those who study English literature than to
Germanists and those who work in the general area of critical
theory. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as
Fascist (1979) reveals some interesting developments in Jameson's
reception of Adorno, and in his views on the utopian element in the
theory of the Frankfurt School. Adorno privileged modernist works
of art as the last outposts of resistance to the totalizing
conjunctions of a hegemonic "culture industry." The reifications of
this industry transform certain ideological categories into
dominant constructs in the sphere of mass culture in a manner
Adorno and Horkheimer saw as linking it to Nazism and fascism. The
title of Jameson's book would seem to indicate a decisive break
with the Frankfurt School, since it implies that modernism may be
assimi- lated by fascism rather than resisting it. Of course, given
what is often seen as the anti-hegemonic and polysemic character of
works of art as- sociated with postmodernism, Adorno's view of
modernism as a final refuge of aesthetic alterity has led many,
including Jameson, to conclude that Adorno's modernist aesthetics
are somewhat anachronistic.'6 But Jameson actually draws on the
Frankturt School to defend Lewis' signifi- cance (and thus his own
choice of Lewis as the subject of a book-length monograph) when he
cites a theorem of the Frankfurt School, which he would come, in
Late Marxism, to associate specifically with the individual figure
of Adorno: ". .. the continuing vitality of Lewis' work confirms
the proposition of the Frankfurt School that the aesthetic value of
works of art is directly proportional to their systematic formal
repudiation of the fallen world of empirical being, of reified
appearance and of the sta- tus quo" (FA 19). Jameson's move to
corroborate this central dictum of
16. A striking exception to this tendency is evident in Albrecht
Wellmer's study, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne:
Vernunftkritik nach Adorno (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1985), which
makes frequent use of Adorno's dialectics in Wellmer's own
dialectic mediation of these two movements.
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136 Jameson's Adorno
the Frankfurt School in order to tacitly defend his own
elucidation of utopian resistance in otherwise prototascist or at
least resolutely class- biased works of art will be repeated in The
Political Unconscious, we will see, and shows an extremely shrewd
grasp of the global implication of the Frankfurt School's latent
utopian impulse, a hidden comprehen- siveness (or "totality")
inherent in the applicability of its aesthetic prin- ciples most
critics tend to overlook.
A later passage in Fables of Aggression builds on Jameson's
adumbra- tion, in the essay on Lacan, of the overtly libidinal
element in the Frank- furt School's utopian conjectures. In the
earlier work, Jameson showed how the utopian was evoked as
libidinal satisfaction through a negative dialectical inversion
(Essays 1, 79-80). In Fables oJAggression, Jameson defines this
operation more clearly in bringing Roland Barthes' concept of mod-
ernistic stasis ("suspension") into contiguity with the negative
dialectical invocation of the utopian by Adorno and his
colleagues:
By this suspension, in which representation undermines itself,
modernism hopes to preserve and to keep open the space of some
genuine Experience beyond reification, the space of that libidinal
and Utopian gratification of which the Frankfurt School speaks, a
space in which ihe failure of imagination, canceled by the form it-
self, can then release the imaginary to some more intense second-
degree fulfillment and narrative figuration. (FA 171)
Drawing on Barthes to show how modernism subverts representa-
bility - a subversion Jameson has indicated elsewhere is motivated
by modernism's reaction to the overdetermined manipulation of and
ex- cessive reliance on the representational by the naturalist
movement - he also allows us to see why Adorno and his colleagues
were drawn to modernist works in projecting their own conjectures
and conjurations of the utopian. As Buck-Morss has observed, Adorno
always insisted that the "nonidentity" between subject and object,
word and thing, re- main a tixed part of philosophical
consciousness; this is the foundation for any genuine "hope for
utopia."''7 Jameson indicates that the under- mining of
representation unique to (or at least most strongly manifest in)
the modernist movement established it as the tundamental aesthet-
ic nexus from which Adorno and the Frankturt School could draw in
evoking a utopian space resolutely tied to the principle of
non-identity.
As Jameson emphasizes, the Frankturt School believed the crutch
of visual immediacy had to be knocked away trom the imagination it
it
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John Pizer 137
was to project a conceptual domain of satisfaction and release,
and thus approximate the utopian. Adorno's most striking
association of the path to the utopian with the negation of
imagistic plenitude occurs in a refutation, in Minima Moralia
(1951), of Max Scheler's epistemo- logy's, and not in any overt
valorization of modernism. Nevertheless, Jameson makes it possible
for us to see the, consistency in Adomo's ad- herence to a
Bilderverbot in his musings on the future on the one hand, and in
his modernist aesthetics on the other.
The Political Unconscious enacts Jameson's most famous, most
compre- hensive and exemplary search for traces of the yearning for
collective totality and utopian cohesion in the deep structure of
literary works. As Comel West's misguided barb about "utopianism
gone mad" in this book suggests, and as Fables of Aggression
anticipates, Jameson turns up this impulse in the most unlikely of
places. Jameson does not believe literature is simply a register or
repository for this cathected desire; he sees it as a movens of
narrative itself, its latent political agency. Thus Jameson borrows
but expands on the implications of Luk~cs' concept of "totality" in
literature, to the point where he finds that, to quote Jer- ry
Aline Flieger, "a text's 'unconscious' political mission is
primarily a collective or social function, rather than a process of
communication of autonomous individual subjects."'9Jameson and
Adorno were both influenced by Lukics' theory of the reitication
and dissolution of au- tonomous individual subjective identity,
which was elucidated in Geschichte und KlassenbewujStsein (1923).
However, they are tar less in- clined than Lukacs to foreground the
literary markers of individual protagonists' resistance to this
process.20
Jameson discusses Adorno only sparingly in The Political
Unconscious, but makes two rather striking comments on,
respectively, the concepts of totality and utopia in Adorno's
thought. He balances his strong valo- rization of methodological
totality with an acknowledgment of the value in poststructuralist
attention to textual discontinuity and fragmentation,
17. Buck-Morss 90. 18. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus
dem beschiidigten Leben (Franfurt/M.: Suhr-
kamp, 1951) 378-79. 19. Jerry Aline Flieger, "The Prison-House
of Ideology: Critic as Inmate," Diacritics
12 (Fall 1982): 50. 20. Cf. William C. Dowling, Jameson,
Althusser. Marx: An Introduction to 'The Political Un-
conscious' (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984). Dowling believes
Jameson's book, like LukAcs' essays on realism and other earlier
Marxist criticism, "obliquely honors individual identity by
regarding social classes like the bourgeoise and the proletariat as
'collective characters' within that 'story' or salvational account
of history told by Marx" (92-93).
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138 Jameson's Adorno
citing his own work as an example of how these seeming
procedural oppositions can be reconciled. But he is also at pains
to show how even the most radically anti-"totalitarian"
poststructuralists, such as Deleuze and Derrida, ground their work
in an underlying structural unity. He uses Adorno's negative
dialectics as both an example and a technique to show how
poststructuralist theories ultimately presuppose a cogni- tive
totality:
We will therefore suggest that these are second-degree or
critical philosophies, which reconfirm the status of the concept of
totality by their very reaction against it; such a movement is
worked out even more explicitly in Adomo's 'negative dialectic,'
with its counteraffirmation - 'the whole is the untrue' - in which
the classical dialectic seeks, by biting its own tail, to
deconstruct itself. (PU 53-54)
This bringing of Adorno into contiguity with deconstruction is
not unique; in Late Marxism, Jameson will object to a similar move
by other writers who are more closely identified with
deconstruction than he is. What is more significant here is a
slight shift inJameson's own attitude towards Negative Dialektik.
He once again stresses what he finds to be the inherently
self-canceling, self-de(con)structive operation in Adorno's
procedure. However, his explicit suggestion that it
counter-intuitively revalidates the principle of totality positions
him to draw on Adorno more directly in later works to defend the
(in Jameson's work) closely related ideals of methodological
totality and the critical evocation in cultural artifacts of the
collective utopian impulse.
There are moments in Adorno's oeuvre which tend to support
Jameson's reversal. Adorno tells us in the Negative Dialektik,
through a negative inversion of absolute idealism's dialectics,
that the genuine comprehension of a thing (as opposed to the
attempt to force its assim- ilation into a relational system) means
the awareness of the individual moment in its immanent cohesion or
connection (Zusammenhang) with other such moments. He then makes an
approving reference to the "coherence of the non-identical,"'21
thereby evoking the conceptual
21. Adorno, Negative Dialektik 34. Jameson sees just such a
coherence evoked in the oeuvre of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge.
He particularly credits Kluge with coheren- tly bringing together
disparate individual events in his films and stories. Though
Kluge's anecdotal fusion of idiosyncratic experience to collective
history calls their connection into question, it also indicates
that learning itself is an immanent, involuntary process
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John Pizer 139
possibility of an intrinsic totality, a "second-degree" promise
of- underly- ing, systemic unification. It is precisely such
immanent impulses of total- ity, of collective utopian cohesion,
which Jameson discovers in the narra- tives examined in The
Political Unconscious. By reading Adorno "against the grain" as an
ally in this quest, Jameson allows us to examine the critical
presuppositions of works such as Negative Dialektik with a
heightened awareness of their antinomies.
Jameson's subtle appropriation of Adorno as an authorizing voice
for the evocation of utopian desire on a global scale (and thus
even in prototascist cultural artifacts) in Fables of Aggression
becomes more explicit in The Political Unconscious. After drawing
on the more obvious example of Ernst Bloch's Das Prinzip Hoffnung
(1959), in which even advertise- ments are shown to reflect (in an
albeit manipulative manner) the most deep-seated utopian instincts,
Jameson argues that the Dialectic of En- lightenment (1944) has an
agenda similar to Bloch's, although it is less well-recognized:
As for the influential Adorno-Horkheimer denunciation of the
'culture industry,' this same Utopian hermeneutic - implicit in
their system as well - is in their Dialectic of Enlightenment
obscured by an embattled commitment to high culture; yet it has not
suffi- ciently been noticed that it has been displaced to the
succeeding chapter of that work, where a similar, yet even more
difficult analysis is undertaken, in which one of the ugliest of
all human passions, anti-Semitism, is shown to be profoundly
Utopian in character, as a form of cultural envy which is at the
same time a repressed recogni- tion of the Utopian impulse. (PU
287-88)
Jameson's essay on "The Politics of Theory: Ideological
Positions in the Postmodernism Debate" (1984) asserts that Adorno's
investigations of high modernist culture were undertaken with the
same will to reactualize and make manifest this culture's (equally
well-hidden) "Utopian power" (Essays, 2 108). One might therefore
conclude that, in principle, Jameson
process. The learning process adumbrated by Kluge is a becoming
gradually aware of the competencies stored in the body, the
collectivity, and the unconscious through the gradual amassment of
just such non-identitical moments. The slogan used for this process
is "relationality," a principle closely related to the concept of
Zusammenhang as it is constellated in the cited passage of Negative
Dialektik. Jameson also indicates that Adorno influenced Kluge's
and Negt's "Lernprozesse" theorems. See Jameson, "On Negt and
Kluge," October 46 (Fall 1988): 151-77, esp. 175-76.
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140 Jameson's Adorno
sees in Adorno a kindred spirit, one who also searches "high and
low" for the utopian impulse, despite his reservations about the
self-canceling tendencies he finds in Adorno's dialectics. As we
will see, this conclusion is somewhat contradicted by Jameson's
dissatisfaction with Adorno's analysis of mass culture.
Additionally, Adorno and Horkheimer had a much bleaker view of the
dialectical flow of history than Jameson, who, it should go without
saying, is no old-fashioned Marxian optimist in this regard. Thus,
Adorno and.Horkheimer are as likely to associate the utopian with
the (sometimes superticially) delusional as with a positive and
powerful, latent collective yearning. In the same discussion of
anti- Semitism in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment cited by Jameson,
for example, Adorno and Horkheimer assert that reification has
become so all-en- compassing as to seem to the passive masses an
inevitability.
Under such circumstances, all spontaneity, and indeed any
glimmer of the real state of things must itselt become an
"eccentric utopia."22 The notion that the thoroughness of
reification in late capitalism has led all genuine insights into
what lies behind the veil of Maya to appear to bear the character
of delusional utopian thought is considerably gloomier than
Jameson's own mediation between refication and utopia in The
Political Un- conscious. Particularly in the chapter on Joseph
Conrad (PU 206-80), Jameson argues that the utopian resonance in
modernist literature (often unintentionally) serves to offset and
negate the effects of a reification he finds almost as omnipresent
as Adorno and Horkheimer. Modernism counters late capitalism's
effacement of the historical, the sacred, the communal and the
ancient by projecting a narrative space where these values can be
registered and conflictually valorized. For Adorno and Horkheimer,
the truth becomes the utopian through the distortional prism of
society under the spell of an omnipotent reification, while Jameson
articulates the utopian as an aesthetic refuge from this spell.
This is an important difference to be sure. But for all three, the
utopian is an interstice where the "Real," the "authentic," and the
"undistorted" are manifested or at least where they can be
imaginatively discerned.
We have just made reference to what is actually a barely
perceptible distinction in the respective outlooks of-Jameson and
Adorno regard- ing the universal character of reification, at least
in the industrial (now
22. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufkldrung:
Philosophische Fragmente, Gesammelte Schriflten, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1984) 231.
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John Pizer 141
increasingly "postindustrial") Western world. Since Adorno and
Jameson share an obsession with this process more powerful than
that of most Marxist critics (excepting Lukics, of course, who
strongly influenced both of them in this regard), it can come as no
surprise that reification is among the most powerful and striking
themes in Late Marxism. In Marxism, reification is based on the
distinction between use value and exchange value. According to
classical Marxist analysis (particularly in its Luk~csian variant),
capitalism's instantiation of exchange value as the exclusive
foundation of its economic base has had the effect of turning all
phenomena within the orbit of its superstructure, including people
and art, into things, by causing them to be seen merely as po-
tential commodities or producers of commodities. Adorno devoted a
substantial portion of his work to examining the effects of this
process in the age of late capitalism, and Jameson is certainly not
the first of his in- terpreters to carefully analyze this aspect of
his work.23 What is unique but characteristic in Jameson's approach
is his drawing of reification and utopia in Adorno into the same
constellation. For example, he quotes Adorno's pronouncement in
Minima Moralia which defines fetishism as the asylum of the Other
in the phenomenal world, the site where Adorno's "Utopia of the
qualitative," (that which cannot be reduced to sameness by the
system of exchange values), manifests itself. "In the same way,"
Jameson goes on to note in citing a passage from the Versuch iiber
Wagner (1952), "the more familiar theme of reification is thus laid
down: 'The more reification there is, all the more subjectivism
will there be"' (LM 70). Jameson presupposes a ho- mologous
relationship between these two assertions, but the homology seems
invalid. For it is impossible to discern how Jameson makes the leap
from fetishism to subjectivism in analyzing Adorno's concepts, un-
less one makes the implausible assertion that Adorno saw the latter
as the anthropological equivalent of the former.
In spite of its awkwardness, Jameson's striking juxtaposition of
these passages does suggest how, for Adorno, reification leads the
non-iden- tical into retreat. The individual seeking respite from
the relentless ever-the-same instantiated by the system of exchange
value will find refuge in the (superficially discrete) interiority
of subjectivism.24 What
23. For a particularly thoughtful examination of Adorno's views
on reification, see Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An
Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York:
Columbia UP, 1978) 27-51.
24. This is indeed a central premise of Adorno's Kierkegaard:
Konstruktion des Asthetischen (1933).
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142 Jameson's Adorno
Adorno poses as the alternative to the reitied is the unique,
the individ- ualistic, the non-identical, and these qualities are
associated in the do- main of objects with "the Utopia of the
qualitative." Jameson expres- ses discomfort with the very concept
ot "non-identity" throughout the course of Late Marxism,
preferring, for example, to call Adorno "the philosopher of
Identity in a very special sense" (LM 15).
No doubt Jameson's uneasiness with this principle is largely
motiv- ated, as he implies, by the ease with which
poststructuralists have been able to manipulate it in their
writings on Adorno to claim his proxi- mity to their own
perspectives. When Jameson goes on to assert that the
anti-totalitarian and anti-utopian dimensions of current thought
"must be sharply distinguished" from Adorno's opposition to the
principle of identity (LM 22-23), we begin to see why Adorno is the
"skeleton that forever hangs in Jameson's closet" (West). Jameson
is capable of viewing the semi-autonomous aesthetic sphere, the
"place of quality in an increasingly quantified world," and the
distinctive in art as a "Utopian compensation" for grievances
suffered by the psyche through reification (PU 236-37). But he is
much more likely to associ- ate the utopian with a kind of total,
universal identity brought about through the final overcoming of
social stratification, as is evident in the following passage from
The Political Unconscious: "The achieved collectivity or organic
group of whatever kind - oppressors fully as much as op- pressed -
is Utopian not in itself, but only insotar as all such collecti-
vities are themselvesfigures for the ultimate concrete collective
life of an achieved Utopian or classless society" (PU 291,
Jameson's emphasis). In other words, Jameson more often associates
the utopian with social totality and collective identity than with
the discrete and heteroge- neous in art. Thus, with regard to the
relationship between utopia and identity, Jameson and Adorno are on
opposite sides of the fence, and this is what justifies West's
colortul description of Adorno as the haunt- ing specter among the
plethora of thinkers present in Jameson's corpus.
Jameson's discomfort with Adorno's premises concerning the et-
fects of reification in the aesthetic sphere, and with the absence
in these premises of any positive mediation between the collective
and the uto- pian, is even more evident in an earlier work, the
essay "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" (1979). Jameson
expresses admiration here for the Frankturt School's analysis of
universal commodification in all areas of mass cultural life in the
modern age, but feels its exclu- sive tocus on aesthetic modernism
as the sole arena of resistance to this
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John Pizer 143
process of reification - a resistance articulated by a
hodgepodge of solitary artists and couched in so many idiosyncratic
languages - ig- nores the collective utopian impulse in mass
culture. His dissatisfac- tion with Adorno's conception of
non-identity is simply the obverse side of this earlier critique of
what he saw as the Frankfurt School's aesthetic elitism; both
tendencies drive a wedge between the collective and the utopian,
the yearning for which is one and the same in Jameson's view, and
can be found in the modem cultural sphere in its totality, that is
to say, in canonic works of modernism as well as in con- temporary
Hollywood films and pulp fiction.25
Jameson's view of Adorno's utopia concept as fundamentally
divorced from all association with the communal sphere is the
likely reason for Late Marxism's subtle implication that this
concept is eviscerated and uncompelling in Adorno's oeuvre. For
example, Jameson refers twice to the famous sun-bathing image in
Minima Moralia's "Sur l'eau" aphorism, evocative of ultimate
entropy and individual human stupor as the gen- uinely utopian
telos of humanity (LM 101, 115). He also tends else- where to
associate Adorno's utopia concept with individual corporeal
gratification, or with negation, absence, stasis, transience, and
nothing- ness, partly through his choice of citations (LM 102, 112,
218, 222).
On the surface, there does not appear to be a substantial
difference in perspective between this representation of Adorno's
utopian impulse and that of, say, Buck-Morss, who links this
impulse to Adorno's em- brace of the principle of non-identity and
finds a tendency (under Benjamin's influence) in Adomo's work to
seek the utopian in seemingly marginal phenomena, allowing its
presence to manifest itself all the more powerfully through
dialectical contrast. But there is a big difference between seeing
in Adorno's definition of art as the promesse de bonheur (a promise
which rests upon the condition of formal totality) a suggestion of
"false happiness" or "deceptive pleasure" (LM 146), and Buck-Morss'
more upbeat assessment that art for Adorno was "the refuge for that
utopian impulse which could find no home in present reality."26
When we add that Buck-Morss is usually far more direct than Jameson
in connecting Adomo's notion of utopia with an adherence to a
Bitder- verbot, two quite distinct conceptualizations of this
principle emerge. In
25. Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social
Text 1 (Winter 1979): 130-48.
26. Buck-Morss 170.
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144 Jameson's Adorno
Late Marxism, Adorno's utopia is implicitly presented as a final
stasis, while Buck-Morss' The Origin of Negative Dialectics
associates this element in Adorno's writing not only with the
not-yet, but with an unimagined, hid- den and unimaginable (but not
therefore "false") happiness.
Jameson finds a distinction between the dynamics of Adorno's
exis- tential/metaphysical dialectic (and the Bilderverbot he
associates with this dimension of Adomo's thought), and the
corporeal satiety inscribed into the utopian image in "Sur l'eau"
(LM 115). But Adorno's specific dialec- tical contrast in "Sur
l'eau" emerges in a mediation of this image with "vulgar" Marxism's
own utopian image of ceaseless and pointless collec- tive activity,
"collectivity as the blind rage of doing."27 Although Jameson's
evocations of collective utopian engagement bear no trace of such
unthinking, bestial turmoil, Adorno's seeming horror at tradi-
tional images of this realized socialism probably have much to do
with Jameson's reservations about his negative dialectic. It was
precisely be- cause of Adorno's intransigence with regard to utopia
in its mass di- mension, connected to a rejection of Marxian
ideological attempts "to project alternate futures" such as the
beehive-like world evoked in "Sur I'eau," that Jameson -referred to
this dialectic as a "late and desperate concept" in the course of
his discussion of Manfredo Taturi's texts on architecture in the
1985 essay "Architecture and the Critique of Ideol- ogy" (Essays, 2
38). But Marxism and Form shows us that Jameson's dis- satisfaction
with the utopian in Adorno's thought does not lie in a per- ceived
overemphasis on the individual shape of this impulse at the ex-
pense of conjuring its collective manifestation, but in a (somewhat
his- torically inevitable) tailure to mediate between these two
spheres.
Jameson's association of the utopian with an identitarian,
collective impulse, with a nearly chthonic yearning rooted deeply
in both the in- dividual and society and manifested in all art,
leads to a misreading of Adorno's mimesis concept in Late Marxism.
His chapter on mimesis in this work opens with an assertion that
mimesis can be connected to Benjamin's notion of "aura"; both are
mystical constructs trapped (like Adorno's utopian concept itself)
in the dialectic of the particular and the universal (LM 64). As
Buck-Morss has noted, Benjamin's aura concept did indeed play a
major role in inspiring Adorno's mimetic postulates; Benjamin's
belief that literary translation imbued the origi- nal work with a
truth-sustaining aura inspired Adorno to see musical
27. Adorno, Minima Moralia 296.
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John Pizer 145
reproduction through performance as a similarly authenticating
mi- metic practice. Buck-Morss also notes that Benjamin's
articulation of a utopian "name" giving principle in prelapsarian
language, which unit- ed word and thing in a relationship fully
informed by immediacy, in- fluenced Adorno to assimilate "the
utopian elements of mimesis" with his later principle of
reconciliation.28 Michael Cahn has also pointed out Benjamin's
impact on Adorno's articulation of a mimetic lan- guage, but he
indicates that Adorno rejected Benjamin's synthesizing tendencies.
Mimetic language cannot be described, but only high- lighted as a
figural trace in literature and art (as the promesse do bonheur).
Adorno rejects Benjamin's name-giving language as an unrealizable
utopian model, but the mimetic language of art is cast by Adorno as
utopian in order to serve him as a counter concept by which to
critique normative, everyday and philosophical language.29
Thus, as Cahn indicates, and contrary to Jameson's own utopian
postulates, the utopian dimension of Adorno's mimesis concept is
completely divested of the universalist tendency inscribing
Benjamin's name concept and history of mimesis principles. This is
confirmed by Negative Dialektik, where the mimetic moment is
explicitly connected to a process of differentiation and
distinctiveness ("Differenziertheit") grounded in experience. In
this pre-enlightenment mode of observa- tion, one perceives objects
in their radically discrete character through a heightened
awareness of their infinitesimal qualities. They thereby become as
individuated as the subject who observes them. This pro- cess of
individuation creates an elective affinity between the subject and
the object of his reflection. Contrary to Benjamin's elision of
dif- ference in the mimetic moment, this moment is constituted for
Adorno when the uniqueness of natural objects is established by the
discrimi- nating observer. The evocation of difference thus emerges
as a utopian undertaking.30 While Jameson correctly sees Adorno's
mimesis as "bounded" by mimicry and magic (LM 104), Adorno clearly
distin- guishes mimesis from these categories, although the mimetic
in art does preserve the irrational impulse as a residue suppressed
but not extinguished by hundreds of years of civilization. Mimetic
behavior,
28. Buck-Morss 87-89. 29. Michael Cahn, "Subversive Mimesis:
T.W. Adorno and the Modem Impasse
of Critique," in Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, vol. 1, ed.
Mihai Spariosu (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984) 38-39, 44.
30. Adorno, Negative Dialektik 53.
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146 Jameson's Adorno
the making of oneself equal to another, evolves even prior to
the first known art, Paleolithic cave drawings.31 Adorno's partial
structuring of mimesis as the site of an assimilatory primal scene
is no doubt largely responsible for the identitarian, universal,
auratic character Jameson attributes to it. Yet, as Gertrud Koch
has noted, Adorno finds in the mimetic impulse a presocial
resistance to the totalitarian claims of the socialization process,
a resistance which Adorno saw as also engender- ing the equally
primal Bilderverbot.32
The utopian dimension of Adorno's mimesis concept has been tren-
chantly summarized by Miriam Hansen. Instrumental rationality and
the concomitant repression of objective non-identity have developed
so far that mimetic resistance to these trends through
assimilation, mimicry of pre-subjugated nature, and genuine
nondominating reci- procity is only conceivable through utopian
projection. Like Buck- Morss, Hansen associates Adorno's mimetic
with his concept of recon- ciliation; mimesis as a utopian
construct allows reconciliation with na- ture to be projected as a
not-unrealizable telos, though only in the do- main of art. Mimesis
"aims at a mode of subjective experience, a pro- verbial form of
cognition, which is rendered objective in works of art, summoned up
by the density of their construction. Such moments of
transsubjective expression constitute art's promesse de bonheur,
the unful- filled promise of reconciliation."33 Although Jameson
believed Adorno's adaptation of this definition of art by Stendhal
was intended to suggest a false happiness, a happiness sundered
from pleasure (LM 146), he feels Adorno's mimetic allows "some
potential or utopian truth-con- tent to come into its own" (LM 68).
But Adorno finds that the mimetic evokes truth in art only in a
negative way, by dialectically exposing, through the artwork's very
structure, the irrationality of a nature-domi- nating rational
world whose media it is forced to employ in the service of its own
non-instrumental (and thus pre-rational and pre-subjugat- ing)
creation.34 In the face of Adorno's negative dialectics, which ex-
tend to the domain of art, it is difficult to sustain the argument
that his mimetic is a strategy designed to bring fourth a "truth
content," an ex- pression coined by Benjamin in the context of his
more straightfor- wardly redemptive aesthetics.
31. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, 4th ed. (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,
1980) 487-88. 32. Koch 37-39. 33. Miriam Hansen, "Mass Culture as
Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida,
Kracauer," New German Critique 56 (Sping/Summer 1992) 52-53. 34.
Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, 86-87.
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John Pizer 147
Jameson uses this phrase in arguing that the term "narrative"
may be substituted for Adorno's "mimesis" in order both to avoid
the aporias associated with a mimetic view of human language and to
ac- cess the dramatic richness of reason's drive toward domination
as de- lineated by Adorno (LM 66-67). In Marxism and Form, Jameson
asserted in connection with Lukics' Theorie des Romans that "Utopia
is not an idea but a vision. It is therefore not abstract thought,
but concrete narration itself that is the proving ground for all
utopian activity" (MF 173). Jameson suggests that Bloch shared this
view, and organizes the bitur- cated temporality informing Bloch's
evocation of a utopian fulfillment into "dramatic and lyrical
modes" (MF 146). Bloch's utopian principle is the one most strongly
endorsed byJameson in The Political Unconscious as articulating a
Marxist ideal of the future (PU 236). It may be argued
thatJameson's focus on Adorno at the expense of Bloch and Lukics in
Late Marxism indicates a certain skepticism about the utopian
postu- lates expressed earlier. But although he carefully
distinguishes the thought of Adorno from that of Bloch and Lukiacs
in Late Marxism, his misreading of Adorno's mimetic with a
narrative striving towards the revelation of a utopian
truth-content brings about their entanglement. Their attempts to
evoke the utopian are seen by Jameson as inscribed by narrativity,
by a narrative moment in search of a hidden truth. The concept of
"narrative" is traditionally associated with linearity, conti-
nuity, and successivity, and Adorno's work is marked by deliberate
fragmentation and the antinomies of his negative dialectics.
Jameson's belief that this term can be used to clarity Adorno's
mimetic is thus highly questionable. Jameson is aware that Adorno's
thought most strongly resists an assimilation to his own continuous
striving to eluci- date the utopian, and this is why his engagement
with this dimension of Adorno's thought is at once more conflicted,
lengthy and produc- tive than his treatment of utopia in Bloch,
Luk~cs and other writers. But this utopian telos also leads Jameson
to somewhat misconstrue Adorno's mimetic.
Much of Late Marxism is devoted to an exploration of Adorno's
aes- thetic modernism. Though Jameson identifies Adorno as a
proponent of modernism as a "high" cultural movement, he is careful
not to accuse Adorno of the peculiarly insular and interiorized
form of utopianism many (including Jameson himself) have identified
as its movens. For Adorno is so rigorously attuned to "the
commodity form" which lies "at the very heart of twentieth-century
modernism," as Jameson noted
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148 Jameson's Adorno
in his 1976 essay "Criticism in History" (Essays, 1 134), that
he can only view modernism's totalizing utopian instinct as a form
of second-na- ture resistance to this commodification, and does not
allow himself to be seduced by the chimeric visions of modernism
themselves. Indeed, if Adorno does embrace any manifestations of
this quite heteroge- neous movement, it is the "nominalist or
minimalist moment[s]" he found in the work of artists such as
Schonberg and Beckett (LM 159). However, Jameson characterizes
Adorno's modernism as somewhat dated, particularly when he
considers how even the most powerfully oppositional works
associated with this movement have been coopted in the postmodern
world to further the process of absolute commo- dification: "For
what was once an oppositional and anti-social phe- nomenon in the
early years of the century, has today become the dom- inant style
of commodity production and an indispensable component in the
machinery oftthe latter's ever more rapid and demanding repro-
duction of itself." Hollywood uses Schanberg's theories in
composing musical scores, and multinational corporations use
paintings of the high modernist school to adorn their office
buildings.35
This brings up the more general question of how Adorno is to be
seen in the context of postmodernism, or, more precisely, it leads
us to a consideration of Jameson's views on this subject,
particularly as they are mediated by his conceptualization of the
utopian. Albrecht Well- mer's comparison of Jameson and Adorno as
they stand under the sign of the postmodern is instructive in this
regard. Referring to Jameson's 1982 interview in Diacritics,
Wellmer notes a parallel between his opti- mistic views on the
possibility of a non-authoritarian postmodern con- cept of totality
instantiated by "the postmodern renunciation of the vi- olence of a
'totalizing' reason," and Adorno's embrace of the "non-vi- olent
unity of the manifold." He also sees Jameson's delineation of the
allegorical character of postmodern art as reminiscent of Adorno's
(and Benjamin's) aesthetics.36 Wellmer's indication of Jameson's
proxim- ity to Adorno in the affirmation of a non-totalizing
totality dimly dis- cerned in the postmodern age reminds us that
Late Marxism is one of the few works on Adorno to show how the
concept of totality itself played a positive heuristic role in
Adorno's sociological and aesthetic explora- tions. Jameson shows
us how this concept, even as it is conflictually
35. SeeJameson, "Reflections in Conclusion," Aesthetics and
Politics, Ernst Bloch, et al. (London: New Left Books, 1977)
208-09.
36. Wellmer 51.
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John Pizer 149
evoked in Adorno's negative dialectics, can be used as a
corrective to the postmodernist embrace of the aleatory and random
(LM 244-45). Indeed, in the same breath in which Jameson repeats
his assertions about the outmoded character of Adorno's modernist
aesthetics, he draws on them to represent, by way of contrast, the
utopian impulse in postmodernism's mass cultural artifacts.
This impulse is even more occluded in postmodern cultural
products than in works of high modernism because of the superficial
but "univer- sal depoliticization" inherent in the contemporary
age, and Jameson proposes a new theory of postmodern
commodification, which would update Adorno/Horkheimer's "now
historical one," as a similarly sober- ing corrective to now
dominant "utopian" (here used in a negative sense, indicative of
misplaced sanguinity) theories of mass culture (LM 142-43). We
might thus modify Wellmer's comparison to note that Jameson may
show a kinship to Adorno in his evocation of a positive postmodern
concept of totality, but he more directly draws on Adorno in repre-
senting the deep structural entanglement of hegemonic commodi-
fication, totality, and utopian tendencies (as well as their
distortion by contemporary theoreticians) in the postmodern
age.
One must also concur with Wellmer's highlighting of a contiguity
between Adorno's belief in the allegorical character of all art and
Jameson's characterization of postmodern aesthetics as
fundamentally allegorical in nature. Nevertheless, Jameson
identities Adorno's incli- nation to see legitimate works of art as
discontinuous, highly individu- ated, and incapable of being
unified under the broad rubric of artistic typologies as nominalism
rather than as an embrace of allegorical aes- thetics. Adorno's
nominalism is not only a significant topic in Late Modernism (see
especially LM 157-64), but in Jameson's book on post- modernism as
well, where it is defined as "the tendential repudiation of general
or universal forms (including genre itself) and the intensiftying
will of the aesthetic to identity itself ever more closely with the
here and now of this unique situation and this unique expression"
(PM 152). In Asthetische Theorie, Adorno actually defines the
tendency of individual art works to nullity aesthetic transcendence
- and by this he means the pu- tative transcendence of external
form as well as of the temporal "here and now" -- as the
catastrophic realization of art works as allegory (though even the
dissipation of aesthetic transcendence through such allegorization
itself becomes aesthetic). This is the apocalyptic "explo- sion" of
works of art, which allows them to wrest themselves from the
empirical. Although he attributes this dynamic property to all art,
he
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150 Jameson's Adorno
cites modernists (Wols and Wedekind) as examples, and describes
it as universal only in connection with "art today."37 It is a
general axiom of Adorno's aesthetics that this element in
avant-garde art is what exposes, in a liberating manner, its
reified character. Jameson, on the other hand, focuses on the
postmodern as the locus of such resistance.38
This brings us to Jameson's elucidation of the utopian in
postmodem art. Although Late Marxism indicates that the utopian
dimension in works of postmodernism is particularly well-concealed,
he notes in Postmoder- nism, or, the cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism that "Utopian, in First World postmodemism, has become a
powerful (left) political word rather than its opposite" (PM xvi,
Jameson's italics). Jameson periodically reminds us in the course
of this work of the need to isolate the utopian impulse in the
postmodem, particularly in view of conservative attempts to see it
as detaced. According to Jameson, postmodernism is principally
defined by its lack of a discrete and totalized interior authorial
space, and post- modem works celebrate their deindividuated status
as ancillaries to a vaguely contoured "metatext." Thus, one can see
why Jameson's claim in Late Marxism that the postmodem age is
characterized by universal depoliticization is entirely consistent
with his assertion in Postmodernism that the utopian is overtly
tied to the political in postmodern art. For the political
dimension of postmodem art would inevitably be quite overt it such
art foregrounds its exteriority, its relationship to the outside
world, no matter what overt political content is manifested in such
exteriority, and no matter how apolitical the outside world appears
to be. Jameson, in fact, draws on the principle of nominalism which
he associates with Adomo to elucidate what he sees as the collapse
of the inner, discrete ar- tistic space as a meaningful, coherent
realm in the postmodern age.39 He
37. Adorno, Asthestische Theorie 131. 38. I am largely indebted
to Ulrich Sch6nherr's article "Adorno, Ritter Gluck, and
the Tradition of the Postmodern," trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, New
German Critique 48 (Fall 1989): 135-54, for this insight. Schdnherr
objects to a tendency he finds in both Adorno and Jameson to
privilege strategies of resistance in avant-garde works over such
strategies as they are manifested in older, "traditional," efforts.
Of course, Adorno's distinction is between modernist art and
earlier or contemporary "epigonal" creations, while Jameson uses
the same criterion in differentiating between modernity and the
postmodern. See esp. 153.
39. Though Martin Donougho's distinction between them on the
issue of such a differentiated site should also be taken into
account: "Where Adorno hopes to main- tain a certain critical space
for the aesthetic, via a modernist negation of the reified life-
world, postmodernism accedes to what Jameson calls the abolition of
critical distance." In Donougho, "Postmodern Jameson,"
Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, ed. Douglas Kellner (Washington
D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1989) 85 (Donougho's emphasis).
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John Pizer 151
also uses Adorno's authority in refuting anti-utopian thought,
and draws on the Adorno/Horkheimer concept of a "dialectic of
enlightenment," with its refutation of all first terms, to show the
conservative fallacy of see- ing Marxist projections of utopia as
contaminated by nostalgic visions of a prelapsarian/precapitalist
paradise (PM 336-37 and 363-64).
These strategic moves in Postmodemism are consistent with a
tendency we have discerned throughout the course oftJameson's
entire oeuvre, a strategy uniquely his own; despite Adorno's
reputation as a pessimistic, non-utopian, "melancholy" (Gillian
Rose) thinker, and in spite ofJameson's obvious misgivings about
this radically negational tenor of Adorno's the- ory, Jameson
constantly has recourse to Adorno - sometimes conflic- tually,
sometimes as a supporting witness - in developing his own con-
ception of utopia, and in tracing utopian manifestations throughout
the history of Western culture. And in Postmodernism as elsewhere,
Jameson turns Adorno's negative dialectic on its head in order to
demonstrate the overall historical viability of "totality" as a
discursive category, a category Jameson once again brings into
contiguity with the idea of the utopian (PM 401-02). Adorno may be
the skeleton in Jameson's closet, but he also plays the role of
Mephistopheles to Jameson's Faust, the spirit who, in constantly
denying, negating and nullifying, forces Jameson to focus his
dialectical energies as he attempts to glimpse utopia as the
totalizing and totalized projection of collective human desire.
diacritics a review ofcontemporary criticism
Volume 22, Number 1 includes: Postmodernism, or The Anxiety of
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Eco's Echoes: Ironizing the (Post)modern o Literature in Another
South Africa: Njabulo Ndebele's Theory of Emergent
Culture o Image and Chatter: Adorno's Construction of
Kierkegaard * The Mimetic Circle
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Article Contentsp. 127p. 128p. 129p. 130p. 131p. 132p. 133p.
134p. 135p. 136p. 137p. 138p. 139p. 140p. 141p. 142p. 143p. 144p.
145p. 146p. 147p. 148p. 149p. 150p. 151
Issue Table of ContentsNew German Critique, No. 58 (Winter,
1993), pp. 1-191Front Matter [pp. 1-24]Have the Intellectuals
Failed? On the Sociopolitical Claims and the Influence of Literary
Intellectuals in West Germany [pp. 3-23]Homeric Laughter by the
Waters of Babylon [pp. 25-44]From Schoenberg to Odysseus:
Aesthetic, Psychic, and Social Synthesis in Adorno and Wellmer [pp.
45-64]Abortion as Repression in Christoph Hein's The Distant Lover
[pp. 65-78]Making off with an Exile - Heidegger and the Jews [pp.
79-85]The Timeliness of Martin Heidegger's National Socialism [pp.
86-96]Antisemitism in Postwar Germany [pp. 97-108]Afro-German
Cultural Identity and the Politics of Positionality: Contests and
Contexts in the Formation of a German Ethnic Identity [pp.
109-126]Jameson's Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Utopian [pp.
127-151]Dissatisfied Society [pp. 153-178]Intellectual Deliverance
[pp. 179-191]Back Matter [pp. 152-152]