Last September, the critic and theorist Fredric Jameson died. This Fall, the Theory Center reflects on what Jameson’s work means for us today. We focus on the problems Jameson returned to again and again, as he sought to fashion a Marxist cultural criticism adequate to his changing times: the legibility of history, the possibilities of a dialectical criticism, and the concepts of totality, reification, utopia, and periodization. We pay special attention to the role of form in Jameson’s analyses of the correlations between the aesthetic and the social. His career of more than fifty years prompts us to ask questions about the nature of critical thinking. Are critics like Jameson even possible today? Can his example provide insight into what the social position of the critic can be in today’s social, intellectual, and media environments?
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Our reading list for this semester includes a significant sample of Fredric Jameson’s countless reflections on literary form, cultural critique, theoretical practice, finance capitalism, utopian politics, and dialectical criticism. The extension and complexity of Jameson’s work reveal his extraordinary effort to grapple with the historical contradictions of his time. This selection of texts will provide the occasion to explore how Jameson brings together disparate elements such as the structuralist study of aesthetic form and the Marxist analysis of the mode of production, the postmodern embrace of difference and the totality of the capitalist system, the products of pop culture and the politics of utopia, the Western philosophical canon and the postcolonial cultures of the global south, and the commitment to revolutionary politics and a certain indifference toward militancy and polemic, among many others. We will discuss how the dialectical method, which, as a devoted Hegelian, Jameson practiced throughout his life, enabled him to problematize and at the same time reconcile many conceptual oppositions and social antagonisms. In sum, to follow his own slogan, “Always historicize!”, we will try to historicize his own work vis-à-vis our present.
The Center will host three distinguished scholars, each of whom will participate in a session of the reading group, as well as offer a public lecture.
