Review: The Prison-House of Ideology: Critic as Inmate

Reviewed Work(s): The Political Unconscious by Fredric Jameson

Review by: Jerry Aline Flieger
Source: Diacritics , Autumn, 1982, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 47-56
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 THE PRISON-HOUSE
OF IDEOLOGY:
CRITIC AS INMATE

JERRY ALINE FLIEGER

i t
Fredric Jameson. THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS. Ithaca, New York, Cornell
University Press, 1981.

"Since Marx, we have known [. .] that history has no 'centre' except in

ideological misrecognition. In turn, Freud has discovered for us [ ..]
that the human subject is decentered, constituted by a structure that
has no centre either, except in the imaginary misrecognition of the ego,
t ni 5. !
i.e. in the ideological formations in which it recognizes itself." [Louis
Althusser, "Freud and Lacan," in Lenin and Philosophy (New York and
London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 219-20]

"The counter-transference [ . .] arises in the physician as a result of the

i MI
patient's influence on his unconscious feelings." [Sigmund Freud, "The
Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy," in Collected Papers, II] l .' .c
I
THE CRITIC'S PRACTICE

Diagnosing the ills of literary theory

Jameson's latest work is provocative in every sense of the word: the sheer
audacity of its premise -that the political perspective constitutes "the absolute
horizon of all reading and interpretation" [p. 17] - is sure to kindle the Ainterest
)AD ( A M1 b n of
anyone interested in the politics of esthetic theory. Even the title of the work
(The Political Unconscious) is a provocation of sorts, a challenge to the familiar
Freudian doctrine that the "Unconscious knows no history," an assertion *.* which Z
has long served to insulate the canon of psychoanalysis from ideological
iWU
inquiry. And since the critic is Fredric Jameson, this account of the politics of
textuality is the occasion for high hopes: we may expect that this work will pay Ru (TIC
due attention not only to those lessons concerning ideology and causality put
Ilwa- p
forth by the Althusserian Marxists, but also to the notions of desir and the
decentered subject championed by Lacanian and Derridean poststructuralists.
With Jameson playing analyst, we can hope that the uncentered word will
finally be called upon to speak its political piece.
Thus the stakes of this game seem to make it well worth playing. But the
scope and ambition of Jameson's project exceed even the high expectations
aroused by the title of the work, the promise of a conciliation of Marxian and
Freudian esthetic theory. For Jameson has not contented himself with assuming
the dual role of political analyst and literary therapist, taking on the whole of
literary history as his patient. Jameson's claim is not merely that his political
approach will reconcile or complement other modern and postmodern veins of
critical theory-and in so doing will correct or supplement all earlier efforts of

DIACRITICS Vol. 12 Pp. 47-56

0300-7162/82/0123-0047 $01.00 ? 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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the Freudian left to elaborate a properly historicized concept of textuality- but that the
radical analysis which he is setting forth will actually subsume all other analyses:

One of the essential themes of this book will be the contention that Marxism sub-
sumes other interpretive modes or systems; or, to put it in methodological terms,
that the limits of the latter can always be overcome, and their more positive findings
retained, by a radical historicizing of their mental operations, such that not only the
content of the analysis, but the very method itself, along with the analyst, then
comes to be reckoned into the "text" or phenomenon to be explained. [p. 17, my
emphasis]

As if this claim were not already a global one, Jameson also asserts that this totalizing
move of appropriation and correction will somehow manage to leave the most valuable
tenets of poststructuralist thought in place, "celebrating such conceptions in their intensity"
[p. 53], even though Derrida and his followers, by Jameson's own admission, "explicitly
repudiate such 'totalizations' in the name of difference, flux, dissemination, and heterogene-
ity" [p. 53]. From the outset, then, this analyst heralds a cure for the ills of all literary criticism
to date, asserting the claim of the Marxist critic that it is he and only he who may make the
peace between the proponents of history and those of a more or less disinterested esthetics,
the champions of synchronic analysis and the partisans of diachronic criticism.

Critic as therapist
Jameson's critical practice is strikingly analogous to the work of the psychotherapist: in
his encounter with the textual symptom, the political critic pays close attention to what is not
said, as well as to the manifest narrative. For Jameson asserts that "it is in detecting traces of
that interrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried
reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its func-
tion and its necessity" [p. 20]. Thus the critic's task is one of restoration of a kind of "full
speech" [parole pleine] to the text of history itself.
In terms of literary history, the critic's therapeutic work requires an "unmasking of
cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts" [p. 20], in an operation of double exposure. For
the critic seeks first to strip away the veil of artistic form - reversing the operation of "veiling"
or disguise which, according to Freud, transforms the writer's fantasy into a work of art
[Freud, "Art and its relation to daydreaming," Standard Edition, IX, p. 153]- in order to lay
bare the political quotient of wish-fulfillment, the ideological vested interest in the text. And
at the same time that the critic unmasks the ideological valance of apparently innocent texts,
he also exposes the false assumptions of his colleagues in the practice of critical theory,
whose analyses, he asserts, are guilty either of neglecting the role of history in textual pro-
duction altogether, or of considering history as a simple and straightforward mechanical
determinant of the text's content. In other words, Jameson's "therapeutic" method purports to
study the etiology of the textual symptom, though not with an eye to uncovering the
pathology of the individual writer-the goal, for instance, of Mauron's psychobiography-
but rather with an eye to exposing the ideological matrix from which the text is generated as
well as in which it is received or interpreted. Like much of modern literary critical
methodology, Jameson's analyses focus on the text as a process, proposing to "dismantle and
deconstruct" its parts in order to reveal its "functioning and malfunctioning" [p. 21].
This emphasis on process, deconstruction, and functional analysis is, of course, a
testimony to Jameson's apprenticeship in Derridean and Freudian/Lacanian theory, but not
even these "masters" are exempted from the tendentious thrust of his inquiry. For Jameson
sets himself the task of avoiding what he calls the "reductiveness of the Freudian master nar-
rative," which remains circumscribed by the bourgeois ideology of the nuclear family [see
the discussion on pages 62-69], as well as the sin of antihistoricism or esthetic solipsism
which has so often been attributed to the poststructuralists. The pupil thus claims to subsume
even those theories in which he has been schooled, all the while making use of their insights
to compensate for the shortsightedness of even the best of the Marxist critics, whose
analyses, Jameson charges, have remained bound to simplistic notions of mechanical or
expressive causality [pp. 46-56]. Finally, it should be noted that Jameson's project attempts

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to subsume not only the discourse of other critics but also his own earlier efforts at
elaborating a poetics of textuality. Specifically, Jameson's current work completes and cor-
rects the reflections on the nature of ideology in Fables of Aggression [University of California
Press, 1979] and the speculations on the compatibility of synchronic and diachronic analyses
in The Prison-House of Language [Princeton University Press, 1972]. Indeed, The Political
Unconscious almost seems to have been engendered in response to a kind of prophetic call
issued at the end of The Prison-House:

Indeed, the hermeneutic here foreseen would, by disclosing the presence of preex-
isting codes and models and by reemphasizing the place of the analyst himself,
reopen the text and analytic process alike to the winds of history. [ . .] It is only, it
seems to me, at the price of such a development, or of something like it, that the
twin, apparently incommensurable, demands of synchronic analysis and historical
awareness, of structure and self-consciousness, language and history, can be recon-
ciled. [p. 216]

In The Political Unconscious, Jameson has attempted to "open the text to the winds of
history" by updating a familiar Marxist notion-the concept of a mediating term, which
entails the finding of a key concept which is operative in several registers of social and
political life. Mediation is to be replaced by the concept of "transcoding," which Jameson
defines as "the invention of a set of terms, the strategic choice of a particular code or
language, such that the same terminology can be used to analyze and articulate two quite
distinct types of objects or 'texts'" [p. 40]. Of course, the whole of Jameson's critical project,
especially as it is elaborated in The Political Unconscious, may be considered an example of
"transcoding" of Freudian and Marxian terminology, with an eye to "reconciling" the "twin,
apparently incommensurable demands" of individual subjectivity and of collective history.
That this project of reconciliation, moreover, is confluent with Jameson's call for a reconcilia-
tion of synchronic and diachronic modes of analysis is apparent in the choice of three levels
or registers of textual analysis. For Jameson proposes to use the device of transcoding to
study the text first in its local historical context (its "diachronic" relation to historical events);
second, in its relation to the class which produces it as a tool of legitimation of rule (a
simultaneously synchronic and diachronic study of the text as the vehicle for the
ideologemes of a dominant class); and third, in its relation to the mode of production as a
whole, in a systemic (or synchronic) view which takes into account the larger historical
horizon. The third "synchronic" level, significantly, will enable the critic to study not only the
production of the text but its reception by different historical periods, its changing ideological
valence or use [pp. 75-76].

Filling the prescription

Considered in light of his earlier work, then, Jameson's current project would seem to
function as a kind of wish-fulfillment, an attempt to fulfill his own therapeutic prescription for
a conciliatory and all-inclusive method of analysis which would transcode the categories of
individual and collective subjectivity. One has to be sympathetic with this endeavor, which
is an attempt to mediate between proponents of the view of text as symptom of history and
those who see the text as an "always already written" play of desire. But when reading this
work, one is left with the uneasy feeling that perhaps too much is being assumed: in Laca-
nian terms, one suspects that the Utopian resolution forecast at the work's close, however
seductive, may in fact be an Imaginary construct, a wish-fulfillment which pretends to effect
what may, in the last analysis, be an impossible conciliation between the estranged partisans
of history and of desire. Indeed, the fervent wish expressed at the close of The Prison-House
can be seen as a kind of pre-symptom, an intuition of the "countertransference" which may
jeopardize the findings of The Political Unconscious. (To cite the most obvious example, one
has to wonder if the deconstructionist move can be summarily dismissed, with a wave of the
shaman's wand, as a number of "second-degree critical concepts which reconfirm the status
of the concept of totality by their very reaction against it" [p. 53].)
Like a good therapist, Jameson poses all the right questions concerning the ideological
status of the text, the possibilities of historicizing the findings of psychoanalysis, and the

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vocation of the work of art in an agenda for social progress. But unlike a competent therapist,
Jameson has failed to heed his own advice concerning the need to "reemphasize the place of
the analyst himself" [The Prison-House, p. 216] in order to avoid the pitfall of counter-
transference, the therapist's implication in his patient's "vested interests," of which a too hasty
or conclusive diagnosis is sometimes the symptom. The resounding religiosity of Jameson's
closing section, on "The Dialectic or Utopia and Ideology," leads us to be wary of his "Imag-
inary" agenda for history and for criticism, and to wonder to what degree his own solution is
in itself a symptom of ideological closure. Is there not, perhaps, a "Symbolic" critical
methodology, one which would not short-circuit in idealist notions of Utopia?
To answer this question-which is a political one "transcoded" into Lacanian ter-
minology-we must follow the lead of Jameson's titular project, using the tools of
psychoanalysis to reevaluate the vocation of art itself. Jameson's own work, I will argue,
hesitates between two concepts or levels of ideological analysis, but his own vested interest
in finding a "cure" for ideological closure causes him to opt in favor of a simplistic view of
ideology as the false consciousness of the other, rather than as an invisible "prison-house,"
from which the critic will attempt to escape at his peril.

II

IDEOLOGY AND MISRECOGNITION: READER AS POLITICAL PRISONER

"Ideology is a representation of the Imaginary relationship of individuals to their

conditions of existence." [Louis Althusser, "Ideology and the State," in Lenin
Philosophy, p. 162]

"The Imaginary may be described as a peculiar spatial configuration, whose b

primarily entertain relationships of inside and outside with one another . ..
which is 'good' is associated with 'my' position, and the 'bad'simply characteriz
affairs of my mirror rival." [Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marx
Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject," Yale French St
55-56 (1977), p. 357]

The political unconscious

Jameson is not, of course, the only Marxist critic whose work seeks to unmas
of unconscious ideological cathexis in the production and reception of the
Jameson's account of this process is unusual in its insistence on dethroning what
"bourgeois ideology of the individual subject and of psychic unity or identity" [p
reigning category of esthetic theory. Whereas Terry Eagleton, for example, calls fo
tionary criticism which would not only "engage with the language and unco
literary texts," but also "reveal their role in the ideological constitution of the subj
Benjamin: or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso Editions, 19
Jameson seeks an understanding of the role of the unconscious in that "symbolic af
of a specific historical and class form of collective unity" which is performed by th
text [p. 291]. For Jameson, a text's "unconscious" political mission is primarily a c
social function, rather than a process of communication of autonomous individu
But unfortunately Jameson fails to provide a clear-cut working definition of hi
cept- that of a "political unconscious" which acts as a determinant of the "social
act" which is the text. It remains unclear just how the political unconscious diffe
object of psychoanalysis, to which Jameson refers as "the genuine Unconscious."
to wonder if Jameson's terminology is intended to function literally or figurati
object of his study the political component of the Freudian Unconscious, or is h
term "unconscious" metonymically, to indicate a mere displacement of form or
Nor do the textual references to the political unconscious satisfactorily elu
concept. At some points in Jameson's study (especially in the Introduction and in
of Gissing), the political unconscious is characterized as a repressive or distor
which colors or "textualizes" historical fact, and which consequently seems to

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instrument for the dominant class, whose values are reflected in the literary work. According
to this instrumental notion, the political unconscious is responsible for making history "inac-
cessible to us except in textual form," since our approach to "history and to the Real itself
necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political uncon-
scious" [p. 35]. Yet at other moments in Jameson's work, the political unconscious is
characterized not as a textual agency, but as the non-dit itself, the buried "reality" which the
text conceals. This unconscious historical reality seems to be more retrievable at some
historical moments than at others, for Jameson writes that at our present "reified" moment of
history, the "truth" has been "relentlessly driven underground by accumulated reification,"
and thus has at last become "a genuine Unconscious" [p. 280]. In other words, Jameson
seems to hesitate between a theory of the political unconscious as a textual agency-
understood either as an instrument of the dominant class or as a kind of nonpartisan motor
force which "seeks a solution to the contradictions of the historical moment" [p.167] - and a
theory of the political unconscious as a property of the literary text itself.
It is only fair to note that these same indeterminacies characterize Jameson's theoretical
model - the Freudian Unconscious - which is defined at various moments in Freud's work as
a pool of libidinal energy, as a mode of psychic functioning (primary process), as a process
coextensive with repression (since the Unconscious "originates" in repression), and as an
agency at work in certain conscious processes as "formations of desire" (joking, parapraxis,
etc.). In the third chapter of New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, Freud summarizes
these various tendencies in an appropriately vague umbrella definition. The Unconscious,
he writes, "may be considered any mental process the existence of which we are obliged to
assume, because for instance, we infer it in some way from its effects, but of whose existence
we are not directly aware." The aptness of this characterization for Jameson's "political
unconscious"- which, as we have seen, seems to function simultaneously as a cause and an
effect of repression, as a "text" and a textualizer- leads us to suspect that Jameson's concept
is not simply analogous or even homologous to the Freudian Unconscious, but is, to some
degree at least, an instance of the "genuine Unconscious."
It is true that Jameson himself tends to distinguish between the Freudian Unconscious
and his own political version, even seeming to argue at one point for the priority of the func-
tion of wish-fulfillment in the former, as "the motor which gives any cultural artifact its
resonance" [p. 142], but which subsequently "finds itself diverted" (by the secondary agency
of the political unconscious?) "to the service of other, ideological functions" [p. 142]. In other
words, the artist's fantasy seems to precede its ideological "diversion"; but Jameson takes care
to point out that the artist's "wish" is itself formed and limited by ideological factors, which act
as a determinant of the dreams a writer may dream. So, which can be said to come first, the
ideological chicken or the fantasmagoric egg? One can argue, of course, that such a distinc-
tion is only a heuristic one, since a proper Marxian analysis must emphasize the dialectical
character of the interaction between artist and society. A kind of syllogistic argument may be
made against the chicken-egg debate as well, in reference to Jameson's own assertion (in the
Introduction) that "everything is in the last analysis political" [p. 20]. For if Jameson is to be
successful in his avowed mission of dethroning the concept of individual subjectivity, which
he considers a bastion of bourgeois ideology, then he must also be willing to subject the indi-
vidual category of "the genuine Unconscious," to which he seems to subscribe, to the appro-
priation of a collective (hence political) subject. For this is, after all, the most important
political ramification of Lacan's doctrine of the decentered subject: if the individual's Uncon-
scious is a function of the Other and of others, it must be considered, "in the last analysis," to
be a political construct, even when it is seemingly an effect or instance of individual subjec-
tivity. The distinction between a "genuine Unconscious" and the political unconscious can
no longer be said to prevail.
If we concede, however, that it is useful to maintain such a distinction, if only to
evaluate Jameson's critical project and to differentiate it from "pure" or "nonpolitical"
psychoanalytic criticism, then the differentiation can only be made in terms of the concept
of Ideology, which Jameson defines as "a vested interest in and functional relationship to
social formation based on violence and exploitation" [p. 299]. Our task, in other words, is to
determine just where the individual's desire or "wish" intersects with the Real, becoming a
"vested interest" in the exercise of power.

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The sentence of ideological "closure"
In the Prison-House of Language, Jameson has likened Althusser's celebrated concept of
ideology-as both a permanent and an Imaginary construct-to a kind of mental incarcera-
tion:

For Althusser, in a sense, we never really get out of our minds: both ideology and
genuine philosophical investigation, or what he calls theoretical praxis, run their
course in the sealed chamber of the mind. Indeed, it would seem that on one level
ideology is distinguished from theory only in that the latter recognizes its own
idealistic character. [pp. 106-07, my emphasis]

Ideology, then, is a kind of Lacanian misrecognition [meconnaissance] of the Real relation

between subject and society, an "empty word" [parole vide] which serves as a kind of barred
cell ("a grillwork of form, convention of belief which orders our actions [p. 107, my italics]).
But as the grillwork of action and belief, the ideological cell is also a kind of matrix, a kind of
social order which, accordingly, "even in socialist society will retain a function" [p. 107].
According to this formulation, which is counterposed to the more traditional Marxist notion
of ideology as a kind of false consciousness to be surmounted in socialist society, ideology
can no more be abolished than can the "Imaginary" register in Lacanian psychoanalysis. In
Lacanian terms, in fact, one could argue that like the Imaginary register of which it is an
instance, ideological thought persists and coexists with that "genuine philosophical investiga-
tion" or "theoretical praxis" which functions as a kind of "Symbolic" discourse, a political
parole pleine. Or, as Barthes would have it (in Mythologies), ideology is as all-pervasive as
the air we breathe, an invisible prison of assumptions which are the sum of all that "goes
without saying."
Jameson's earlier work seems to adhere to the Althusserian concept of ideology as an
invisible grillwork of convention from which no one is ever totally freed, and which assures
that the final "truth" of History (or of the Real) will remain out of reach, "an unknowable string
of events which you can never know directly in the form of a 'true' or 'adequate' representa-
tion of consciousness" [Fables of Aggression, p. 12]. Jameson follows Althusser's lead, assert-
ing that the Real is the Absent Cause of history, an "asymptotic phenomenon, which the sub-
ject approaches in anxiety in the moment of truth, and from such approach to the Truth then
tends to retreat again" [p. 12]. This conception of History or the Real as unknowable is, of
course, radically opposed to the notion that Marxist methodology holds the key to the
prison-house of ideological thought. For as Jameson himself points out, in the same passage
in Fables of Aggression, ideological representation is not merely "false consciousness" or
"insufficient conceptualization" but is rather "an authentic way of grappling with a Real which
must always transcend it." The patient in search of the "full word" of history is sentenced to an
interminable cure.
This may, of course, be very bad news for the literary critic who pretends to have
discovered "the absolute horizon" of textual interpretation. By what authority can the critic
claim to transcend his own enclosure in a grillwork of convention, form, and belief? If, as
Jameson suggests, the Marxist methodology manages to yield an "adequate account of the
essential mystery of the cultural past" [The Political Unconscious, p. 19], "marking the con-
ceptual points beyond which the limits of a specific consciousness cannot go, and between
which it is condemned to oscillate," can it also claim to give an adequate account of the
critic's own historical moment, his own "grillwork"? In the Conclusion, Jameson (significantly
and symptomatically) testifies against the ideology of the other guy, claiming to reveal his
crime of "false consciousness, of class bias, and ideological programming" [p. 281], using the
evidence of the text (as vehicle for the ideologeme) to "put him away" behind the "limits of a
specific consciousness." Jameson's allusion to false consciousness is, of course, a telling one,
since it seems to represent a symptomatic retreat from his own earlier allegiance to the
Althusserian notion of a permanent and inescapable Ideology. By what authority, we must
ask, does Jameson now claim exemption from the prison-house of ideology? Is he seeking an
acquittal, or does he claim to be freed only on a kind of parole?

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Countertransference: demanding asylum
Indeed, the fact that Jameson's work concludes with an explicit distinction between
ideology and Utopia ("The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology") would seem to indicate that
the critic's earlier hesitation between two views of ideological closure has been resolved in
favor of the more traditional Marxian view of ideological thought as false consciousness: the
Utopian vision, accordingly, seems to be the moment of triumph of authentic consciousness,
the moment when the other will finally see things my way. Even though Jameson does re-
mind himself and us of the "undiminished power of ideological distortion that persists even
within the restored meaning of cultural artifacts" [p. 299], in what is apparently a concession
to his earlier adherence to the concept of the permanence of ideology, the ringing religiosity
of his Utopian forecast attests to his belief in a happy- and more or less definitive - ending to
the case history of history, and thus finally gives short shrift to some of the most authentic
and provocative insights of Marxism. For the notion of the permanence of ideology may be
considered as a testimony to the need for a continued and ongoing struggle, or, transcoded
into psychoanalytic terms, may serve as evidence for the interminability of the cure. In each
case, the goal of the struggle is a real diminuation of suffering and increased actualization of
societal and individual potential, not an ending to the case history in a Utopian vision of "car-

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nivalesque dispersal" [see Jameson on Bakhtin, p. 285], a notion characterized by all elli-
sions, omissions, and short-circuited promises of gratification which are symptomatic of an
Imaginary construct. An uncovering of the political unconscious must not finally make us
unconscious of the political.
The strictly literary consequences of Jameson's claim to ideological asylum are not less
unfortunate: we seem to be left with the equally unsatisfactory choices of attributing the
appeal of all art, whatever its political content, to its origin in a collective or Utopian impulse
[Jameson, p. 289], and hence of acceding to a naively uncritical analysis of the esthetic pro-
cess which is finally idealist in nature; or, on the other hand, of adopting an inflexibly
negative hermeneutic which limits the critical function to a process of exposure and
demystification of ideological bias. This sort of blind alley or reductive view of the work of art
can be attributed to the effects of the critic's own "cathexis," his investment in that narrow
definition of ideology (as a kind of false consciousness) which will best serve his own
Utopian "wish." We are reminded of a lesson learned from the poststructuralists: that no
critical insight is exempted from a corollary blindness, and that the jubilation of the pro-
nounced cure is often myopic, characterized by the kinds of unauthorized diagnostic short-
cuts and misrecognitions, or simple-minded rejections of alternative points of view, which
are symptomatic of the Imaginary register.
In Jameson's work, the critical countertransference has resulted in a misappropriation,
or even a premature dismissal, of some of the important theoretical models which his
method claims to subsume: namely, Althusserian Marxism, deconstruction, and
psychoanalysis. In the Introduction, for instance, Jameson ends up acting as apologist for the
very concept ("mechanical causality') which he has just gone to great pains to refute, in favor
of the Althusserian concept of structural causality. Jameson performs a slick critical
manoeuvre, when he claims that the concept of linear or mechanical causality, however
limited or limiting, is a legitimate tool for the study of modern texts, simply because it is itself
a kind of "modern" symptom of the prevailing tendency to reify the cultural artifact. But how
can Jameson argue, as he seems to be doing, that Capitalist literature must be analyzed with
"Capitalist" perspectives and tools, without relinquishing all hope of performing that unmask-
ing operation which he considers to be an essential component of political and literary
analysis?
An even more disturbing "blindness" or short-circuit undermines Jameson's claim of hav-
ing assimilated the lessons of deconstruction into his totalized historical methodology. One
has a choice, it seems to me, of either accepting the rules of the deconstructionist's game -
the premise or groundrule that no totalized solution may offer an access to Truth -or of
rejecting that premise, and refusing to engage in that particular game. But to claim to have
selected out elements of the deconstructionist position -which is, in the final analysis, a
refutation of the validity of totalization -to be recuperated back into a total system, is, it
seems to me, to be guilty of a kind of misdiagnosis or critical malpractice which must preju-
dice one's analysis.
But perhaps the most serious case of misrecognition in Jameson's work is manifest in his
claim that his methodology subsumes that of psychoanalysis: both because his work fails to
give an adequate account of the findings of psychoanalytic literary criticism, and because
those psychoanalytic concepts which do figure in his analysis by no means function as an
auxiliary theoretical corpus, but work as an absolutely essential component of Jameson's cri-
tique of subjectivity. The most glaring "sin of omission" concerning recent developments in
psychoanalytic literary criticism is, in my view, his (symptomatic?) omission of any discussion
of feminism, especially since the feminist analysis is, by definition, a political one. The
arguments of feminists like Jessica Benjamin and Stephanie Engel [see Christopher Lasch's
"The Freudian Left and Cultural Revolution," New Left Review, No. 129 (1981), pp. 27-34] in
favor of a reconsideration of the importance of preoedipal models of personality in social for-
mations- not as narcissistic or regressive paradigms, but as an alternative to the Oedipal and
patriarchal model of competition and "autonomy" which is the underpinning of Capitalist
society- propose a more intriguing and theoretically rigorous model for a cooperative soci-
ety than do the vague visions of Utopia put forth by Jameson. If Jameson wants to "subsume"
psychoanalysis with a political perspective, he would do well to look at recent developments
in feminist theory.

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 And Jameson's cooptation of psychoanalysis is all the less convincing because his own
most provocative and coherent insights are often psychoanalytic in nature. Consider, for
example, his discussion of the Imaginary and Symbolic registers in the Balzacian novel
(chapter three), which is an elaboration of an earlier argument for a "balance" between these
two registers in the practice of critical theory itself. In his first articulation of this idea [in the
1977 Yale French Studies piece on Lacan quoted above], Jameson maintains that a critical
imbalance in favor of the Symbolic leads to an unmooring of the text from the Real and
results in a kind of esthetic solipsism or preciosity characteristic of some of the more self-
indulgent exercises of poststructuralism; while an imbalance in favor of the Imaginary may
all too often result in an uncritical assertion of the truth of one's own interpretation. If these
excesses are avoided in Jameson's treatment of Balzac, it is perhaps due to the mediation of
psychoanalysis. For not only does his discussion of the Imaginary and Symbolic registers
derive directly from Lacan; but his notion of the coincidence and collaboration of the indi-
vidual's fantasm with his class ideology relies on the Lacanian doctrine of the uncentered
subject.

Critical reconnaissance
In other words, if the discussion of Balzac's "realism and desire" is an impressive and
illuminating display of what is best in Jameson's method, it is perhaps because Jameson has
made the fullest possible use of Lacanian and Althusserian notions, surmounting his own
tendency either to reject the critical theory of the other as simply that which is "bad because
it is not 'me'" [see above, p. 52], or to appropriate such "otherness" in a reductive move. It
also may serve as an example of the promise of a "Symbolic" register of critical theory,
though not in the sense of the term as it is used in Jameson's Yale French Studies piece - in
which the "symbolic" is equated with an overprivileging of the linguistic model and a neglect
of history - but rather in the fullest Lacanian sense of the Symbolic as a locus of "recognition"
[reconnaissance] of the Other. In the French, the term denotes not only the opposite of
misrecognition or false consciousness, a kind of lucidity, but also a kind of gratitude toward
the Other. Superimposed on the Oedipal model, this suggests a recognition of the positive
function of the Oedipal father who has acted as an obstacle to a stultifying and regressive fan-
tasy of union with the Oedipal mother. According to this perspective, the reconnaissance is
that assent to the intrusion of the Real onto the Imaginary which is necessary for all human
development. In terms of the practice of literary criticism, reconnaissance would mean an
acknowledgement of the work of the other critic, rather than an annexation or dismissal of
that work. The other critic would no longer represent my mirror rival, whose work is inferior
to mine, nor the other self whose work merely repeats my own, but would represent the
locus of the therapeutic insertion of the Real - and of the real limitations of history - upon
my most cherished critical fantasies of omnipotence.

The life sentence

Were Jameson consistently faithful to such a project of critical reconnaissance, with an
eye to promoting the fullest implementation of the tools of psychoanalysis and deconstruc-
tion, rather than to proving the inadequacies of these perspectives or their status as a kind of
incomplete Marxism, his work might avoid the kind of short-circuits - concerning ideology,
desire, and the status of the critic-to which it frequently falls prey. Recently, much of
psychoanalystic criticism has addressed itself to this problem, seeking to demonstrate that
the critic's "asylum" is no safe vantage point from which to intone against the Other's false
consciousness. (Two of the more provocative arguments against the "innocence" of inter-
pretation have been forwarded by Jean Bellemin-Noel [Vers I'lnconscient du texte (Paris:
PUF, 1979)] and Soshanna Felman ["To Open the Question," in the aforementioned issue of
Yale French Studies].) While Jameson's earlier work has shown an awareness of "the risks of
the concept of a 'midwife' of truth" [YFS, p. 386], his current work seems to have lost hold of
this important insight: if the literary critic demands a kind of political asylum, he must be will-
ing to assume the status of "inmate," remaining aware that he himself views the world
through an Imaginary grillwork of Ideology.
This is of course the negative implication of the concept of the permanence of ideology
(and its psychoanalytic corollary, the permanence of desire or the interminability of the

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cure): there is no "happy ending" to history, either private or collective, for the Imaginary
gratification is always out of reach. But the positive implications of the "recognition" of these
limitations of "Real life" are no less significant: the permanence of ideology/desire assures the
permanence of a constructive struggle which may coincide with a creative act, with that
which is most sublime in what Marx has called our human or "species being." For the Imagi-
nary register will of course persist, but it need not remain a narcissistic dream of solipsistic
gratification. It can serve, rather, as the limiting term of the dreams we dream - including the
dream of a better world, of an Imaginary society where, in Marx's words, "all that is solid will
melt into air." It can coincide with that hope for a better (if not "ideal") future which must
inform our interminable human practice.
And if the permanence of desire coincides with the permanence of the Unconscious,
and thus with a defeat of our most "reasoned" attempts at its subjugation and enlightenment
("where Id is, Ego shall be . ."), it also insures the possibility of a derepressive fantasy, which
may be resistant to the cooptation of all manifestations of will, including the will to subjugate
and enlighten others. When the political unconscious is understood in this way, it may not
be surmounted: ideology will not be abolished, but it may well cease to be the source of a
nightmare abuse of power. For a patient elaboration of the dialectic of subject and
society - which does not seek to banish the notion of subjectivity but to redefine it - allows
us to understand Ideology as an instance of the Unconscious itself, a "double inscription"
which is also that distorting agency which persistently "underwrites" our efforts at lucid
analysis and dogs and doubles our most "self-evident" formulations. Like the Unconscious
itself, the political unconscious, although all-pervasive, remains inaccessible, "knowable only
in its effects" (Freud). Indeed, this equation between the Freudian or subjective Unconscious
and the Althusserian political unconscious (Ideology as Imaginary relation to lived experi-
ence) solicits a reformulation of the celebrated Lacanian formula, inviting us to explore the
ways in which the Unconscious is structured like an Ideology.
And if language is the tool by which the therapist illuminates his patient's Unconscious,
it is also the tool by which the critic leads a "patient" reader into the labyrinth of a talking
cure, a never-ending passage from misrecognition to reconnaissance. This process, it seems
to me, will ultimately recognize the literary text as more than a mere ideological vehicle
(Eagleton) or as an escape from ideological constraint into a fully realized Utopia (Jameson).
The text may be "recognized," rather, as a mediating term between imagination and reality.
In the words of Althusser ["A Letter on Art," Lenin and Philosophy, p. 222], "art is what makes
us see ... the ideology from which it is born.. . a view which presupposes a retreat, an
internal distantiation from the very ideology from which [the work of art] emerged." If the
critic is to aid in this process, playing the therapeutic role of revealing the artistic distantiation
from "all that goes without saying," he must follow Freud's lead by recognizing his own
imprisonment in the maze of intersubjective desire and by relinquishing any claim to a posi-
tion outside ideology. For a life sentence is just what it implies - an ongoing "commitment" to
a life-affirming practice.

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