Marxism, Morality, and the Politics of Desire: Utopianism in Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious STACI L. VON BOECKMANN It will always be a fault not to read and reread and discuss Marx—which is to say also a few others— and to go beyond scholarly “reading” or “‘discus- sion.” It will be more and more a fault, a failing of. theoretical, philosophical, political respor ity. ‘When the dogma machine and the “Marxist” ideo- logical apparatuses (States, parties, cells, unions, and other places of doctrinal production) are in the process of disappearing, we no longer have any excuse, only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility. There will be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, with- out the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case of a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his spirits. For this will be our hypoth- esis or rather our bias: there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them. (13) — Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx AS DERRIDA REMINDS US HERE, there are as many spirits of Marx as there are Marxisms, and it is our responsibility to read and discuss them. This essay contributes to that discussion by examining Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, a text which holds a key position in contemporary Marxist theory and which remains central to literary critical study. Here, Jameson develops an interpretive method which operates through a dialectical under- standing of ideology, which he takes to be a dual force both negative and positive in nature—the former he terms ideology, the latter Utopia. It is this Utopianism which constitutes the moral thrust of Jameson’s Marxist herme- neutic and which will be the focus of this essay. My discussion of utopianism in The Political Unconscious will, first, examine Jameson’s reconfiguration of the “ethical” with respect to tradi- tional Marxist critiques and to contemporary literary criticism and, second, demonstrate the ways in which Lacanian psychoanalytic theory makes this reconfiguration possible.’ Only by understanding this reconfiguration, as32 UTOPIAN STUDIES well as Jameson’s claim for its necessity, can we appreciate the utopian ele- ments in his hermeneutic, which remain always in tension with ideology. In Jameson’s working through of it, the traditional vocabulary of the ethical question gets displaced and rewritten into the Jamesonian lexicon which understands the ethical as a particularly modernist discourse invested in and limited by “the individual.” This distinction, in turn, effects his conception of the utopian in that it is no longer a category whose meaning is “filled” by ideals of the just, the moral, or of equality as laid out in descriptive utopias; instead, the utopian comes to be equated with a form of thinking—the col- lective—which has been effectively shoved to the netherside of our (pol cal) unconscious. The final section of the essay takes the form of a response to Cornel West’s critique of The Political Unconscious, which becomes an illustrative point of contrast for examining Jameson’s utopianism.? After a closer examina- tion of West’s critique, I ’s “ontological uto- iscuss what I will call Jameson's pianism” (a characterization I borrow from Clint Burnham) by way of contrasting it to West’s secular utopianism, where utopianism comes to be understood as a code word for Marxism itself in the two forms represented by Jameson and West respectively. That is to say, it rings as a truism in the ears of anyone who studies the body of work now commonly referred to as Marxist theory (the adjectivization somehow conveying this very point) that there are as many spirits of Marx as there are Marxisms. This multiplicity is visible not least in considering the differences between these two leading figures of Ameri- can Marxism, whose interpretive battle centers, finally, around their differ- ing conceptions of the relationship of hope (utopian theory) to time (praxis). The very choice by Derrida of the word “responsibility” invokes the ethi- cal dimension of Marxist thought which above all is the attempt to conceive of a future which is somehow better, more equitable than our historical pres- ent. Perhaps somewhat perplexingly, Jameson’s text calls for a “transcend- ing of the ‘ethical’ in the direction of the political and the collective” (61). Jameson’s suggestion that contemporary criticism must get beyond ethics has been a call to arms for many readers of Jameson’s text. In order to more clearly understand Jameson’s particular brand of utopianism, however, we must appreciate his motivation for transcending the ethical, as well as his reconfiguration of the category itself. In his introduction to The Political Unconscious, Jameson writes that ethi- cal criticism is “the predominant form of literary and cultural criticism today” (60). He goes on to say that this form of “weak rewriting” of the text is confined to the category of the individual and fails to address the larger ramifications of its textual objects of study.’ Accordingly, it is the purpose of Jameson's interpretive method with its three concentric horizons “to transcend any impulse towards an ethical criticism in the direction of a criticism that rec- ognizes the content of all morality as a sublimation of concerns and interests that are ultimately political in nature” (White 153). This should be no sur- prise to anyone even moderately conversant with Marxist tenets; however,Marxism, Morality, and the Politics of Desire 33 in discussing Jameson’s text it becomes important to distinguish between traditional Marxist critiques of morality and Jameson’s own engagement of the ethical in The Political Unconscious. ‘Among the ideological beliefs perpetuated by culture, morality is fun- damental in Marxist critique. As Marx and Engels argue in The German Ideology, morality must be understood “within the frameworks of definite modes of production, which, of course, are not dependent on the will[—] alien practical forces, which are independent not only of isolated individuals but even of all of them together, always come to stand above people” (104). It is these “alien practical forces” brought about by the existing modes of production and relations of production that preclude the kind of morality posited in the philosophies of German idealism by eliminating the possibil- ity for a subject with a rational (free) will. The German Idealists, Marx and Engels argue, ignore the complex network of material forces acting upon the individual in society. As a result, there arises the “seeming contradic- tion” between personal and general interest which has been the foundation of their discourse on morality. Marx and Engels write: [I]n this process of private interests acquiring independent existence as class interests the personal behaviour of the individual is bound to undergo substanti- ation, alienation, and at the same time exists as a power independent of him and without him, created by intercourse, and becomes transformed into social rela- tions, into a series of powers which determine and subordinate the individual, and which, therefore, appear in the imagination as “holy powers.” (GI 104) When ideas become separated from the material conditions which made them possible, they assume the form of universal concepts to which society must conform; a process that both legitimates and perpetuates the power structure of a given epoch as the structure itself is both the origin and the fulfillment of the ideal concepts—the alpha and omega, so to speak. It is in this process of projection of the concepts as ideal, general interest that the empirical conditions of life specific to a society in a given moment come to tule over individuals, transhistorically, as moral imperatives. When morality is thus received as general interest and perceived by consciousness as ideal it is epiphenomenal, no longer conceived as arising from the material condi- tions of social being. Marx and Engels’s critique of bourgeois morality does not involve the replacing of one set of moral imperatives with another; rather, it involves a going beneath morality, a seeing through the idea to its material base. Marx and Engels in their critique define morality as ideology, as epiphenomenal, superstructural. As such, morality can never be a force of social change, that is of change in the material conditions of existence, but can only take the form of an imperative, isolating its activity to the self-consciousness of the indi- vidual. Marxism, by understanding morality “within the frameworks of defi- nite modes of production” (GI 104), provides the grounds for changing the material conditions of life to eliminate the conflict between private and gen- eral interest, allowing for the recognition of successive moral codes, which themselves are under perpetual production and destruction by human praxis.34 UTOPIAN STUDIES By recognizing that private and general interest emanate from the same “personal development of people,” insofar as they are the products of the same material conditions, these interests retain the possibility of coinciding with one another. It is the moment of establishing collective interests, one in which private and general interest coincide, towards which Marxism works. But such a moment can come about only through community. As Marx and Engels write, the separation of private and general interest “can only be abol- ished by the individuals again subjecting . . . material powers to themselves and abolishing the divisions of labour. This is not possible without the commu- nity” (GI 83). Revolution can come about for Marxism only through collectivity. It is this precondition of collective life (what will become the utopian essence of Jameson’s hermeneutic) that shifts the grounds of Jameson’s cri- tique of the “ethical” in The Political Unconscious—a critique which takes a markedly different form than that of Marx and Engels. The terms of the dis- course on morality to which Marx and Engels refer, and which come imme- diately to mind when we read the word “ethical” are not, Jameson claims, those of his own engagement. Rather, his object of study, the “ethical,” is informed by the modemist and late capitalist category of the individual which becomes, for Jameson, Marxism’s ultimate contemporary battle- ground. He writes: [I]t may strike the reader as paradoxical or even perverse to characterize the bulk of garden-variety literary criticism today as “ethical,” by which we nor- ‘mally understand a moralizing, or moralistic, didactic gesture. . . This is to misrecognize the dominant form taken by ethics in our own situation, which is essentially psychological and psychologizing, even where it appeals for its authority to this or that version of psychoanalysis. Here notions of personal identity, myths of the reunification of the psyche, and the mirage of some Jung- ian “self” or “ego” stand in for the older themes of moral sensibility and ethical awareness. (60) This likely confusing view of the ethical is perhaps best explained by way of example. Tobin Siebers, in The Ethics of Criticism, characterizes the “cri- sis” in literary criticism as the result of the attempts to replace the human with the linguistic. This shift follows from poststructuralist views of signifi- cation which reject the postulates of Enlightenment humanism, foreground- ing the circulation of linguistic signs as constitutive of meaning rather than the individual, expressive human subject. What makes this exemplary of Jameson’s point is that for Sicbers this is an “ethical” crisis—the shift away from the expressivist subject to a linguistic one is read by Siebers as the ulti- mate form of reification, “strip(ping] away all signs of the human from our lives” (5). The human, in other words, equals the centered, rational, individual. Ethics, as Jameson characterizes it in its modernist manifestation, is the commitment to the “self” or “ego,” to the category of the individual which has become the ultimate horizon of interpretation—for Jameson, a strategy of containment. Seen in this way, the “ethical” is placed in direct opposition to the properly political and collective task of Jameson’s Marxist herme- neutic. Even the modernist embrace of the Freudian fragmented subject isMarxism, Morality, and the Politics of Desire 35 overshadowed by the belief in a recoverable past which can re-collect, re- center the subject, making our conscious and unconscious selves “somehow ‘integrated’ in an active lucidity about ourselves and the determinations of our desires and our behavior” (PU 283)—the myth of reunification rein- scribes the category of the centered subject. With respect to interpretation, Jameson argues, ethical criticism “con- stitutes the predominant code in terms of which the question ‘what does it mean?’ tends to be answered” (59). Underlying this question is the assump- tion that meaning, textual and psychological, can be unified around the informing instance of the text or the individual psyche, respectively. As opposed to ethical codes “which all in one way or another project the unity and the coherence of consciousness” (60), Jameson’s hermeneutic enterprise (by way of Lacan) understands texts as having an unconscious or other mech- anism of repression which demands a search for meaning beyond that made manifest by the text itself—beyond that which can be elicited by answering “what does it mean?” with “exactly what it says.” In Lacanian terms, asking what it means might get you “reality,” but never the Real. It is at this point that Jameson’s utopian trajectory leads him, so to speak, underground. Lacan’s conception of the realm of the Real, along with Althusser’s conception of History as an absent cause, plays a fundamental role in devel- oping the theory of narrativity underlying Jameson’s hermeneutic. This theory of narrativity is, in effect, an epistemology—that is, for Jameson, narrativity is the fundamental instance of the human mind. In The Age of Structuralism, Edith Kurzweil illuminates the logic of the theoretical fabric which constitutes Jameson’s hermeneutic: Levi-Strauss, from whom Jame- son borrows the pensee sauvage; Althusser, from whom he borrows the notion of history as absent cause; and Lacan, from whom he borrows the concept of the Real and of the unconscious as a function of language, are all part of the structuralist movement which began with the publication of Levi-Strauss’s “Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology” in 1945. What the structuralisms of various disciplines have in common is the attempt to attain knowledge of fundamental structures uniting humankind— “the systematic attempt to uncover deep universal mental structures as these manifest themselves in kinship and larger social structures, in literature, phi- losophy and mathematics, and in the unconscious psychological patterns that motivate human behavior” (Kurzweil 1). It becomes clear, then, why a Marxist hermeneutic formulating a theory of the political unconscious would look to these structuralist thinkers. For the logic of Jameson’s herme- neutic (what I will later call his ontological utopianism) is contingent upon a view of narrative as the means through which we experience reality (Dowl- ing 115). As such, narrative is the always already functioning collective space of Marxism.* The classification of Lacan as strictly a structuralist, however, is some- what problematic, as is noted by Toril Moi in Sexual/Textual Politics and by Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory. Both Moi and Eagleton place Lacan as a post-structuralist in his re-reading of Freud which reinterprets the Oedipal36 UTOPIAN STUDIES scene in linguistic terms. In effect, for Lacan, the Oedipal crisis is the result of the breakdown of the unity of signifier and signified—a unity posited by Saussurean linguistic structuralism. It is the emphasis in Lacanian theory on the gaps which later form between the signifier and signified that character- izes it as post-structuralist. However, the close relationship among these stages of signification as theorized by Lacan preclude any easy categoriza- tion of his position as either wholesale structuralism or post-structuralism. Indeed, one could argue that it is this very quality of Lacanian theory which appeals to Jameson in developing his hermeneutic. For Jameson's herme- neutic itself relies on the play between structure and its absence. On the simplest level, Lacanian theory is made up of three orders: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. In Sexual/Textual Politics, Moi briefly describes the Imaginary as corresponding to the pre-Oedipal period (or mirror stage) “when the child believes itself to be a part of the mother, and perceives no separation between itself and the world” (99). As such, the ry is marked by no difference, no absence; it is the space of unity and identity. Linguistically speaking, as Eagleton explains, “We can think of the child contemplating itself before the mirror as as kind of ‘signifier’ — something capable of bestowing meaning—and of the image it sees in the mirror as a kind of ‘signified.’ The image the child sees is somehow the ‘meaning’ of itself. Here, signifier and signified are as harmoniously united as they are in Saussure’s sign” (166). In the order of the Imaginary, subject and object are one. ‘The Symbolic order, the entry into which accompanies the acquisition of language, is, conversely, the realm of Otherness, separation, and repres- sion of the desire for maternal unity (Moi 99). With the introduction of the father at this stage, the child becomes aware of identity and difference, “that identities come about only as a result of difference—that one term or sub- ject is what it is only by excluding another” (Eagleton, Literary Theory 166). That is, the child becomes aware that language is a system of signs which achieve meaning only in relation to one another, in terms of identity and difference. The concurrent discoveries of sexual difference and of lan- guage constitute, for Lacan, the child’s entry into the Symbolic order. It is at this stage that the unconscious is formed, splitting the subject between con- scious ego and repressed desire. The child learns that “a sign presupposes the absence of the object it signifies” (Eagleton 166). Language, then, is itself a force of desire seeking to represent that which is absent. Desire is the movement of the signifying chain. It is Jameson’s politicization of this desire as the desire for collective life that encodes the utopian within ideo- logically saturated narratives. Perhaps because of its elusive nature and peculiar relationship to the Imaginary and Symbolic, Lacan’s order of the Real is markedly absent from many sussions of his psychoanalytic theory. In her more intricate study of Lacan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan describes the order of the Real as “that which is concrete and already ‘full’” (131). She warns, however, that the order of the Real isMarxism, Morality, and the Politics of Desire 37 not to be equated with reality, objectivity, or empiricism but must be under- stood as behind or outside the orders of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, as. well as inextricably tied to them. For Lacan, Ragland-Sullivan explains, “the Real itself is unmoveable and complete. But man’s interpretations of the Real are moveable” (188). That is, interpretations combine language with experience to construct “reality,” but not the Real which remains beyond signification. Human beings take as real “whatever they see as con- crete, fixed, transparent, or unproblematic” (187). However, objective per- ception of the Real is not possible—or, if at all, only in bits and pieces. “Personal reality,” Lacan maintains, “is built up by structures, effects, and the fragments of perceived fragmentations” (Ragland-Sullivan 187). Here, “reality” is but a fraction of the Real which we experience as effect. The Real, then, is always already outside the Symbolic order, outside significa- tion. The order of the Real and its quality of being present through its absence is crucial to any understanding of Jameson’s conception of the text in his three-tiered hermeneutic, which understands the text as the ideologi- cal projection of a fully present, “centered” representation of meaning. While post-structuralist theories have critiqued the notion of the center and of centered subjectivity with their celebration of difference, flux, hetero- geneity, and dissemination, Jameson finds them problematic. Post-struc- turalist and deconstructive de-centering (of the subject and of the text) takes the form of a “new hermeneutic” of anti-interpretation which itself becomes structural limitation, “teconfirm[ing] the status of the concept of totality [of the center around which such totality can be constructed] by their very reac- tion against it” (53). In other words, some initial unity or totality must be recognized before the deconstructive critique can be practiced. Totalization and deconstruction are, in effect, practices in a symbiotic relationship.> Jameson argues that “only the dialectic provides a way for ‘decentering’ the subject concretely, and for transcending the ‘ethical’ in the direction of the political and the collective” (60). Only through dialectical contradiction does productive tension between the practices of totalization and decon- struction become possible, allowing for a cancelling and preserving of con- cepts from each which transcends both. Jameson asserts that one of the “most modest” contributions of The Political Unconscious will be its “‘unmasking’ of ethics and the ethical binary opposition of good and evil as one of the fundamental forms of ideo- logical thought in Western culture” (88). This “modest” contribution, how- ever, constitutes the basis of his dialectical theory of utopianism. It is Jameson’s contention, against Derridian deconstruction, that it is not meta- physics but ethics that gives meaning to the form of the binary opposition: Derrida has shown how all [axes of binary opposition] function to ratify the centrality of a dominant term by means of the marginalization of an excluded or inessential one, a process that he characterizes as a persistence of “meta- physical” thinking. On the face of it, however, it seems paradoxical to describe the ideologies of the decentered and serialized society of consumer capitalism as metaphysical survivals, except to understand the ultimate origin of the38 UTOPIAN STUDIES binary opposition in the older “centered” master code of theocentric power societies. To move from Derrida to Nietzsche is to glimpse the possibility of a rather different interpretation of the binary opposition, according to which its positive and negative terms are ultimately assimilated by the mind as a distinc- tion between good and evil. Not metaphysics but ethics is the informing ideol- ogy of the binary opposition. (114) Derrida sees the binary opposition as informed by the metaphysical cate- gories of presence and absence. This is perhaps most readily understood in reference to his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination. Here, in an intricate analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus, Derrida reveals the primary binary of speech/writing in Plato’s attack on writing. Plato assigns speech to the paternal position and sees writing as the subversion of the authority of pres- ence, Thus, speech is primary, self-presence; writing is secondary, absence. It is the privileging of the term in the position of presence and the marginal- izing of that in the position of absence that, for Derrida, informs all binary oppositions, i.e. the mind assimilates the positive and negative terms as pres- ence and absence respectively. What Jameson argues here is that rather than these metaphysical categories it is the ethical categories of good and evil that inform the binary logic of Western thought—that is, the opposition between ‘one’s own position (as good) and the Other’s (as evil). Jameson’s discussion of the binary opposition is couched in his expla- nation of the romance genre and of the ideologeme in his “Magical Narra- tives” chapter. Here Jameson argues that the binary opposition is a form without content which gets “filled,” nonetheless, by the apprehending mind as good and evil. Jameson’s point about the binary opposition is made reference to the narrative form of romance, whose semic organization, he argues, functions through positional thinking—the difference between one’s own and that of the Other. This positional thinking is an “irresistible temp- tation,” Jameson argues, and demonstrates the “hold of ethical categories on our mental habits” (116). In other words, even where there is nothing indicative of such positions as good and evil, our habits of mind ascribe them. This deep hold of ethical categories can be explained in part by the introduction of the Other in Lacan’s Symbolic order, which is coincident with language acquisition.’ The entrance of the Other upon the child’s emer- gence into the Symbolic order splits up the child’s dyadic unity with the mother and creates a prohibition of the desire for unity. Thus, the Other introduces identity and difference (positional thinking), creating the condi- tions for primary repression and opening the unconscious. If such positional thinking is a function of language acquisition, then it is little surprise that it should manifest itself in narrative form. The desire driving Jameson’s her- meneutic, it would seem, is the utopian, political desire for a collectivity analogous to this lost dyadic unity of the Imaginary order. Such a collective space can only begin to be thought, however, if one moves beyond the indi- vidual. Thus, Jameson’s hermeneutic requires the movement beyond good and evil, beyond the individual whose “mental habits” are locked into posi- tional thinking. For such an operation Jameson looks to dialectic:Marxism, Morality, and the Politics of Desire 39 As for conceptual thought, if we grasp the problem [of going beyond good and evil] as one of escaping from the purely individualizing categories of ethics, of transcending the categories into which our existence as individual subjects nec- essarily locks us and opening up the radically distinct transindividual per- spectives of collective life or historical process, then the conclusion seems unavoidable that we already have the ideal of a thinking able to go beyond good and evil, namely the dialectic itself. (116) Above all, dialectic is the desire of the mind, as Jameson puts it, “to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps” (Marxism and Form 307), to widen its object of study to include its own habits of mind in the act of apprehen- sion. For Jameson, not only is dialectic the means of transcending the limi- tations of the individual, it is none other than the figure for that mode of future thinking for a social formation not yet come into being—the collec- tivity. Dialectic, then, becomes the form for utopian thinking itself. How- ever, one may be compelled to question: Why has the concept of collectivity become so distant that it must be read at so abstract a level as “figures” and “representations” in cultural objects? Why is it something to work toward rather than something experienced or worked from at a local level? These concerns are resonant with those of Cornel West who challenges Jameson’s hermeneutic as “utopianism gone mad.” “Jameson’s Bad Utopianism”: Cornel West and The Political Unconscious A thought that is immediately useable will do its duty more easily and then disappear than one that is more remote. Because not every thing can be done at once, the more remote, that is, the deeper lying contents, must remain theoretical longer than those that are suitable for immediate use. (153) — Emst Bloch, Theory-Praxis in the Long Run Cornel West is, perhaps, Jameson’s foremost critic. With its emphasis on immediate practice, West’s self-named “prophetic pragmatism’ —a curi- ous mixture of Dewey, Marx, and Christianity—is the inverted mirror image of Jameson’s long run, dialectical Marxism. In his essay “Ethics and Action in Fredric Jameson’s Marxist Hermeneutic,” West confronts what he calls Jameson’s “bad utopianism,” addressing what he takes to be Jameson’s “theoretical flaws” and “political shortcomings.” West argues, here, that Jameson’s compulsion to “get beyond” good and evil is an appropriation of deconstructive strategies, which rather than critiquing Jameson merely sees as “misplaced” (that is, aimed wrongly at metaphysics). This failure, as West says, to be “critical enough” causes Jameson in turn to misread Hegel and Marx. Finally, it is what West sees as Jameson’s problematic conflation of the ethical with the metaphysical and epistemological that informs West's reading of The Political Unconscious.40 UTOPIAN STUDIES West’s critique of Jameson serves as an illustrative counterpoint to our dis- cussion of Jameson’s text, for its points of resistance to Jameson’s dialectical theory of ideology and Utopia provoke a closer look at Jameson’s utopianism. My discussion of West’s critique will take issue with his reading of Jameson in an attempt to clarify West's own misunderstandings which ground his conclu- sions, First, West’s failure to recognize the methodological difference between deconstructive strategies of “going beyond” and those of Jameson's dialectical transcending lead him to disregard Jameson’s reconfiguration of the ethical (that is, his “getting beyond” bourgeois individualism), which as we have seen is the cornerstone of his theory of utopia. Second, West’s resistance to Jame- son’s “conflation” of the ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological, the result of his own understanding of these concepts from within the frameworks of his- toricism and bourgeois individualism, illustrates Jameson’s point about the difficulty of transcending these orientations in order to envision collective life. As West sees it, the central problem with Jameson’s text is that he “reads Hegel through poststructuralist lenses in which the ‘double bind of the merely ethical’ is a philosophical problem that demands categorical transcendence rather than through Marxist lenses in which “the double bind of the merely ethical” is an ideological activity to unmask and transform by collective praxis” (137). The “poststructuralist lenses” West attributes to Jameson are none other than deconstruction itself and, in an interesting move, the identi- fication of Jameson with deconstructionist strategies becomes the basis for West's claim of Jameson’s political paucity. Ironically, for this West bor- rows Jameson’s own critique of deconstruction and uses it against him, say- ing that deconstructive maneuvers are in a symbiotic relationship with those things they seek to critique and are, therefore, impotent. This move to identify Jameson’s strategies as deconstructive is, how- ever, misguided. Jameson does indeed appropriate the language of “going beyond,” but he does so by turning to dialectic. Jameson’s methodology is Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, not the tautological debunking of deconstruction which he himself critiques for reinscribing the very totalities it seeks to deconstruct. Dialectic, instead, is that thinking in which “thought rectifies itself, in which the mind suddenly draw[s] back and includ{es] itself in its new and widened apprehension . ..” (Marxism and Form 372). For Jame- son’s dialectical thinking, Marx includes Hegel so that Hegelian dialectic, in such a widened apprehension just described, makes us aware of our concep- tual instruments or habits of mind as limitations, while Marxist dialectic makes us aware of both our consciousness as a product of material condi- tions and of our socio-economic, historical specificity as limitation. It is through this methodology and not that of deconstruction which Jameson engages the ethical binary in The Political Unconscious—first, by recognizing consciousness as limited by the category of the centered-self from which the positional thinking of good and evil arises. Jameson “tran- scends” the ethical through the dialectical operation of a materialist method which recognizes the productive tension between binary oppositions byMarxism, Morality, and the Politics of Desire 41 reading them, instead, as material contradictions. The contradiction inherent in all ethical thinking—that is, thinking which determines what is evil by “whatever is radically different from me” (PU 115)—is the reality that the Other is never wholly different from oneself. Jameson refers to this contra- diction through the illustrative example of the Romance narrative when at the moment of the villain’s death the “mask” is removed and we find that this evil Other is, indeed, like ourselves and “loses all sinister unfamiliarity” (119). The dynamics of identity and difference, here, can be understood through a Lacanian lens as the interplay between the remembrance (and repression) of the lost dyadic unity of the Imaginary (the realm of identity) and the Necessity of adult emergence into the differences governing the Symbolic order. Thus, the contradiction of ethical thought-—the centered- self which stands as the “I” in opposition to the Othe always already unconsciously aware that things were once otherwise. Jameson engages the ethical binary secondly through a Hegelian-Marx- ist lens by reading the positional thinking of good and evil (via Nietzsche) as socially determined by class relations. It is clear that Jameson reads the double-bind of the ethical through these lenses. Indeed, it is for this very reason that Jameson redirects our attention to ethics rather than metaphysics as the basis of Western binary logic, turning to Nietzsche in order to unmask “the concepts of ethics as the sedimented or fossilized trace of the concrete praxis of situations of domination” (117). Jameson deploys Nietzsche to show that the binary logic of good and evil derives ultimately from class positionings and relations within the modes of production—a much more materialist understanding than the metaphysical categories of presence and absence informing deconstruction. It becomes clear, then, that Jameson’s Hegelian-Marxist dialectic performs the two-fold operation of critiquing both our habits of mind and our material conditions as limitations. What makes dialectical critique methodologically superior to deconstructive strate- gies is that it has both a negative and a positive moment—unmasking ideo- logical limitations and generating, through contrast, what lies beyond those limitations. Recognizing that ethical binary oppositions can never be escaped, Jameson seeks to place them in a productive, dynamic tension through which a vision of collective relations might be imaginable. To transcend ethical thought in this way allows Jameson to make, for example, his assertion that all class consciousness is in its very nature uto- pian. For West, this assertion is evidence of “Marxism in deep desperation,” of “utopianism gone mad” (140). This negative reaction is characteristic of many readings of Jameson, against which the threat of Fascism is raised as an immediate counter-argument. So, how could one say that this ruling- class consciousness is utopian—even figuratively? The point, it seems, is not to argue whether or not fascism is a desirable form of ruling-class con- sciousness. Rather it is to grasp the unexamined operation of the ethical binary with which we approach it. Jameson’s dialectical engagement with ethical binary logic calls for a recognition of its inherent contradiction, namely, that the Other is never wholly different from one’s self. All acts of judgment42 UTOPIAN STUDIES are an attempt to absolve oneself from wrong-doing and widen the gap between self and other. Recognizing the connection between these posi- tions, even in the case of movements such as fascism, causes one to think differently about them, permitting a vision of how in some way one’s own position is somehow connected to, though not identical with or necessarily an endorsement of, that class consciousness heretofore labelled Other, dif- ferent, evil. Thinking beyond the binary logic of good and evil, and with it the limitations of bourgeois individualism, calls not for deconstructive strategies, but for a dialectical movement between the two poles of this opposition which unmasks the habits of mind and material conditions from which they arise. Such unmasking clears the ground for transcending posi- tional thought (and with it the limitations of bourgeois individualism upon which it is founded) and establishing collective identity, however tenuous, for only then can an authentic logic of collective dynamics come into being. West’s second point of contention is raised in regard to what he secs as Jameson’s conflation of the ethical with the metaphysical and epistemologi- cal, arguing that it “rests on an unexamined metaphor of translation, an uncritical acceptance of transcoding” (133). However, in Lacanian theory the issues of metaphysics, of epistemology, and of ethics as positional think- ing are coterminous and interdependent. The metaphysical categories of pres- ence and absence, as we saw earlier, have to do with the primary unity of subject and object in the realm of the Imaginary—the realm of pure pres- ence, of the unity of signifier and signified which is later disrupted with the entry into the Symbolic order. Here, the positional thinking of self and Other, too, becomes available introducing the notions of identity and difference. Jameson himself recognizes this fusion of the metaphysical and ethical in his essay on Lacan where he writes, “Nowhere better can we observe the violent situational content of those judgements of good and evil that will later cool off and sediment into the various systems of ethics” (87). Lacan’s mirror stage, then, not only introduces the categories of presence and absence but clears the ground for the formation of positional thinking. Finally, in the Symbolic order language becomes epistemic, mediating our relationship to Others (including our selves as Other, as split subjects) and to the orders of the Imaginary and the Real. A conflation of the metaphysical, epistemologi- cal, and ethical is possible, then, through the lens of Lacanian psychoana- lytic theory which as we have seen is central to Jameson’s hermeneutic. West goes on to suggest that a “real” Marxist would walk away from these metaphysical and ethical problems and see them as “imaginative ideo- logical responses to once-pertinent but now defunct problematics” (138). West implies that the problems of metaphysics and ethics will finish them- selves off, so to speak, with the emergence of new historical periods, new modes of production which make them outmoded. The problem with this view of history, however, is that it rests on an expre: toricism rather than History. That is, it assumes we are all, in fact, in the same “now” with respect to the modes of production. What Jameson’s discussion of Althusser in the introduction to The Political Unconscious meticulouslyMarxism, Morality, and the Poli of Desire 43 argues is that not only is such a homologous view of history impossible to grasp—even if it were available—but that we do not all share the same now with respect to modes of production. This he does by foregrounding the concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit ot nonsynchronous development which allows for the recognition of competing modes of production, or rather of compet- ing habits of mind derivative of them. In this sense, both left over or “dead” modes of production and those of the contemporary moment are taken into account and recognized as co-existent. West’s reverberation of Marx to “‘let the dead bury the dead’” is promising, but in this respect untheoretically sound. The ultimate question in the debate between West and Jameson be- comes one of history and of the subject’s place within it—a question which brings us, in turn, to perhaps the more poignant point of West’s critique which lies in his command to “take history seriously” and in his contention that Marxism should employ a “Marxist” logic of collective dynamics at the level of local political practice (139-140) rather than calling, as Jameson does, for a “new logic of collective dynamics.” This final point in West's cri- *s relationship to practice and brings tique foregrounds the issue of theory’s into play the contrast between what I will call his secular utopianism’—one which takes as its goal the formation of the better life in the here and now of synchronic history—and Jameson’s ontological utopianism—one based on the idea that narrative, as the “fundamental instance of the human mind,” inscribes unconscious political desire, leaving traces of the collective, utopian impulse through which we attain glimpses of the better life which is not yet but coming into being at the level of diachronic history. ‘One consequence of considering the relationship of theory to practice is that it raises the question of ideology and just how deep it goes. Here, West’s prophetic pragmatism, what I have called his secular utopianism, maintains faith in the presence of subjects who can center, or orient, them- selves with respect to the larger structures of social life and come together as an acting collective. In turn, his conception of the political equates it with the local, or history in the synchronic sense. West suggests that the negative and positive operations of Jameson’s dialectic, both, can derive from the synchronic historical moment. He argues that a “Marxist” logic of collective dynamics would recognize “specifiable historical forces” (140), it would attempt to “discern an evolving and developing Sittlichkeit [system of ethi- cal life] in the womb of capitalist society, a Sittlichkeit whose negative ideal is to resist all forms of reification and exploitation and whose positive ideals are social freedom and class equality” (137). West maintains that the conse- quences of theory should be felt in the present, that the intellectual should play a part in the current political and moral situation of his or her lifeworld through “grass roots” activity.* West's call for a local Marxism is founded on his traditional understanding of the ethical as a moral or moralizing cate- gory which, rather than being transcended, can be deployed to motivate sub- jects to remain engaged in the struggles of the present in order to realize in the foreseeable future the utopian goals inherent in the Marxist project? Jameson’s ontological utopianism, however, maintains no such faith in the44 UTOPIAN STUDIES efficacy of local action. In considering the question of the subject’s relation- ship to history, Jameson (by way of Althusser and Lacan) foregrounds the central roles of language and the unconscious in the ideological incorpora- tion of the subject into social relations. As we will see, for Jameson, these pose real challenges to, and may in fact preclude, the local formation of col- lective logic. In his theory of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), Althusser appro- priates Lacan to argue that ideology pervades every aspect of the subject's lived relations to the state. Eagleton explains Althusser’s conception of this relationship as rather like the mirror stage in Lacan—“In both cases, the human subject is supplied with a satisfyingly unified image of selfhood by identifying with an object which reflects this image back to it in a closed, narcissistic circle. In both cases, too, this image involves a misrecognition, since it idealizes the subject’s real situation” (Literary Theory 173). In such a tautology where “misrecognition” becomes idealized and desirable, how is it that we can slip the grasp of Necessity? Here, Jameson appropriates Lacan to say that both ideology and Utopia pervade the subject’s lived relationship to the state—the former as (false) conscious relations, the latter as the uncon- scious collective desire for freedom from Necessity. Indeed, Jameson’s her- meneutical drive to recover the utopian traces and foreshadowings of collective unity can be seen as analogous to the lost dyadic unity of the Imaginary which drives signification. Jameson himself suggests as much in Marxism and Form where he writes of the hermeneutical enterpri It is because we have known, at the beginning of life, a plenitude of psychic gratification, because we have known a time before all repression . .. a time that precedes the very separation of the subject from its object, that memory, even the obscured and unconscious memory of that prehistoric paradise in the individual psyche, can fulfill its profound therapeutic, epistemological, and even political role. . . . The primary energy of the revolutionary activity derives from this memory of a prehistoric happiness which the individual can regain only through its externalization, through its reestablishment for society as a whole. (113) Here the dialectical operation of Jameson’s hermeneutic is brought to its full- est light—its negative operation to identify the strategic limits of ideology, here the entrapment of the subject in bourgeois individualism; its positive operation to unveil Utopian content, the therapeutic, political, epistemologi- cal role of unconscious memory to remind us of our lost fundamental uni Because our lived relations to the state involve largely unconscious “mi recognition” they are not, for Althusser or Jameson, primarily a matter of cognition (Eagleton, Ideology 19-21). The rational, centered subject of bour- geois ideology, in this light, becomes somewhat of a myth. This view of the subject's relationship to ideology affects, in turn, Jameson’s conception of the political, which he sees as nothing less than the movement of history itself as a series of modes of production. Jameson’s dialectical vision of history negotiates between the twin historical perspec- tives of the synchronic and diachronic, seeing the synchronic as a strategyMarxism, Morality, and the Politics of Desire 45 of containment “which allows what can be thought to seem internally coher- ent in its own terms, while repressing the unthinkable (in this case, the very possibility of collective praxis) which lies beyond its boundaries” (53). In other words, the misrecognition and idealization of bourgeois individualism within the local historical moment makes thinking within the terms of the centered, autonomous subject “internally coherent” and unproblematic. Hence, the need for a “new logic of collective dynamics” (294). For Jame- son, then, the synchronic represents the negative moment of the dialectic (that which must be critiqued as false-consciousness), while the figures and representations within it of the diachronic (whose object is collective life) is its positive moment (the recovery of the “memory” of collective unity which functions now as a utopian trajectory). The more properly political, thus, for Jameson, is the diachronic move- ment of history toward a collective social formation. West's call for the immediate practicality of Marxist theory, its connection to verifiable pol cal movements, echoes the logical positivism and empiricism which consti- tute for Jameson the “dominant ideology of Western countries” (Marxism and Form 367). It is this dominant ideology, Jameson argues, that creates Anglo-American resistance (of which West's critique is characteristic) to dialectical thinking. For Jameson, the “positive ideals of social freedom and class equality” cannot be realized from within the synchronic moment because they cannot be conceptualized as a result of the predominance of bourgeois individualism which precludes authentic collective logic.” The thorough saturation of the synchronic moment in bourgeois consciousness functions, for Jameson, as a barrier to “authentic” transindividual, collective activity— that is, we must speak of the political unconscious rather than political con- sciousness. Though argued in a different context, Burnham’s insightful understanding of Jameson’s “style” as deeply political rather than peculiarly individual has rich explanatory value here. Burnham views Jameson’s lush prose, thick with example and metaphor, “as utopian compensation for the loss of the object . . . a visible and readily apparent class struggle” (66). For Jameson, he goes on to say, “not only is the future utopia not discernible, but so too is the necessity of moving in that direction, in a post-Freudian world dominated by the reality principle” (66). In this sense, one could argue that Jameson’s utopianism is fundamentally pessimistic, insofar as it has become so deeply unconscious as to be unavailable to current-day social and political activity of the sort West advocates. West’s critique of Jameson’s utopianism is useful, in the end, in fore- grounding the central issues through which Jameson’s text is working: ide- ology, the subject, history. But insofar as it understands these issues through different lenses, the very ones Jameson attempts to move beyond, the value of West’s critique is substantially diminished. The critique could be applied to Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious that it neglects the utopian potential embodied in the local, synchronic historical moment by placing too much emphasis on the future."! While Jameson's hermeneutic recognizes utopian elements within the ideologically saturated synchronic moment,46 UTOPIAN STUDIES they are not immediately useable. They are, rather, as yet only figures of hope which, though in this society are “false and ideological,” will never- theless “know their truth and come into their own at the end of what Marx calls prehistory” (293). Some may, like West, argue that Jameson is no longer a “real Marxist” because his theory is not strategically applicable to contemporary political struggles.'? As Leszek Kolakowski explains, how- ever, to ask whose theories most closely correspond to what Marx “really” meant (and, thus to ask who is the “better” Marxist) is to ask the wrong questions (3-4). Rather than critiquing Jameson from the stance of the true representative of Marx, as West does, it is more profitable, when faced with two theorists who both invoke Marx yet with such drastically different visions of Marxist practice, to ask what it is in Marx’s Marxism, so to speak, that gave rise to such divergent formulations of Marxist practice. Here, in my view, the Jameson—West debate can be effectively placed at the intersection of Marxism and utopian theory. The ambiguous and strained relationship between Marxism and utopia is a familiar one. As Man- uel and Manuel describe it in their now seminal work on Western utopian- ism, Marx gets caught in “the utopian web” (699) when, wishing to foreground the scientific necessity of communist society, he nevertheless invokes the ethical and humanist categories of wants and needs in his description of the higher stage of communism. Goodwin and Taylor explain why Marx becomes and must become entangled in this web: “[Though] normative considera tions were dismissed by Marx and Engels as irrelevant in the face of the cer- tain knowledge furnished by historical materialism . . . [they] did not actually succeed in the attempt to purge their work of all moralistic/ethical notion: ... due to the fact that in order to attract the support of both bourgeois intellectuals and workers, they had to be able to present these groups with some sort of picture of what a desirable future socialist and communist soci- ety would look like” (163-4). In short, Marx and Engels’ commitment to the communist party compelled them to enter into the domain of moralistic/eth- ical and normative discourse, introducing a tension between this discourse as it emerged in their utopian vision of communist society and their belief in the dialectical necessity of communism. It is this tension in Marx and Engels” philosophy that enables both Jamesqn’s ontological and West’s secular utopianism and their corresponding visions of Marxist practice. Jameson’s ontological utopianism, though for obvious reasons it can certainly not be qualified as wholesale scientific Marxism, shares with the latter a certain faith in the historical necessity of communism, so that prac- tice is deferred onto the diachronical movement of history toward a Marxist utopia. Unlike that of Marx and Engels, however, Jameson’s Marxism has never been tied to or affiliated with party politics, and so has been able to escape the “utopian web.” Marxism in America, as Zhang Longxi observes, has never been a real political force, an “official ideology or predominant orthodoxy in society at large,” but rather a philosophical orientation, an oppo- sitional discourse to capitalism (73). In this sense, Jameson’s Marxism is a product of his cultural time and place. But rather than using its AmericanMarxism, Morality, and the Politics of Desire 47 character to condemn Jameson’s Marxism (West reprinted a version of his critique in Keeping Faith under the revised title, “Fredric Jameson's Ameri- can Marxism”), more interesting is to consider these peculiarly American traits as signs of the real limitations placed on Marxist theory by our distinc- tively American stage of capitalist development. In this respect, Jameson’s Marxism takes seriously the features of life in postmodernist, late capitalist culture, specifically with respect to the ideo- logical incorporation of the subject. While his reconfiguration of the ethical from its humanist categories to the modernist one of the “individual” and his demand to get beyond this as a limitation to our future collective forma- tion in communism exempts him from providing a normative vision of the better life, it is less a complete dismissal of ideas of the just, the moral, the good—which remain always already the ineluctable aporia of any Marx- ism—than it is an attempt to map out the contemporary battle ground for Marxist theory. Jameson’s dialectical theory of ideology and Utopia fore- grounds both the necessity for collective struggle and what makes this diffi- cult for local political action to achieve—namely, the ways in which the material conditions of social life predispose us to self-enclosure and create boundaries for our vision of the future. NOTES 1. Clearly, the texts which constitute the theoretical fabric of Jameson's hermeneutic are many—Christian biblical hermeneutics, Northrop Frye, Freud, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, and countless others named and unnamed in The Political Unconscious. However, my focus here ‘on Jameson’s reconception of the “ethical” pulls the thread of Lacanian theory to the forefront of my discussion. For, as we shall see, Lacan’s rewriting of Freudian psychoanalysis in lin- guistic terms makes it possible for Jameson to claim that it is ethics and not metaphysics that informs the binary opposition. Moreover, it is the positional thinking which Lacanian theory shows to be a deeply embedded epistemology that creates the situation in which the ethical becomes equated with the individual. 2. All references to Jameson are from The Political Unconscious and to West from his essay “Ethics and Action in Fredric Jameson’s Marxist Hermeneutic” unless otherwise noted. 3. “The category of the individual” refers here to Enlightenment conceptions of the self as centered and rational. More specifically, it refers to the capitalist privileging of this concep- tion of self and the centrality of selfhood or individuality within capitalism as that category through which the world must be understood. That this is so, Jameson argues, is evidenced by ‘ovr modemist “habits of reading” which, in the case of New Criticism and Russian formalism, hermeneutically privilege this category (the individual) as containing “meaning” in isolation from socio-historical and cultural forces. Or, alternatively, in the case of Psychoanalytic criti- ccism, see the individual as the locus of meaning making with the ability to center, organize and synthesize rationally those socio-historical, cultural forces to create stable meaning and a stable self. 4, It should not be mistaken, here, when referring to “universal mental structures” of humankind that these are fixed forms in some Platonic sense, For Jameson, rather, form is the ‘working out of content which is derived from material conditions which are fluid, unfixed What is universal for Jameson is the dynamics of form, the relationship between form and content. For more on the dynamics of form, see chapter 5 of Marxism and Form, “Towards a Dialectical Criticism.”48 UTOPIAN STUDIES 5. “Totalization” can be understood as the belief that meaning can be apprehended as an inclusive, comprehensive whole, or totality. Jameson attempts in The Political Unconscious to distinguish between acts of totalization by teleological or closed systems of interpretation— ‘ones which posit the realization of a definite end or ultimate purpose—and a dialectical, non- teleological act of interpretation which he calls totalizing because it remains subject to the dynamics of history, of process and effect at the same time it assumes there is the possibility of meaning-making, The goal of interpretation, for Jameson is not to read correctly—to get at “the meaning” of the text, as with the liberal humanists—or to fail to read—to deconstruct, as with the poststructuralists—but to look at texts as contexts for comprehending the socially symbolic fabric of culture. It is this search for connectedness among the levels of social life— without positing a retrievable, verifiable, stable, already-out-there totality—that places Jame- son in the space of dialectical contradiction, of productive tension, between the stagnating polarities of liberal humanism and poststructuralism. 6. Lacan’s Other refers to the subject as split, as a non-unity. It refers to the subject’s own Otherness to itself. Too, it refers to various external forces first the (m)Other (mother or pri- sary caretaker) and later the Other(A) as “symbols, rules, and language” (Ragland-Sullivan 16). 7. The term secular utopianism is normally associated with narratives devoted to the depic- tion of utopian society at the level of “social planning,” as Jameson puts it in Marxism and Porm (145-46). 1 am using the term loosely, here, to invoke West’s pragmatism and its empha- sis on change in the “secular” sphere, meaning life as itis lived in the present historical moment. 8. See, for example, “Theory, Pragmatism, and Politics,” where West characterizes the ideal intellectual as a “critical organic catalyst” (36), one who brings together the analytic tools of the academy and the contemporary struggles of real people. 9. West's pragmatism arises as well, no doubt, from his status as an African American. As he explains in a 1988 interview, “[Black America] is a hustling culture, and a hustling culture tends to be radically ‘practicalist,’ deeply pragmatic, because the issue is always one of sur- viving, getting over” (282). As a black American who himself does not face the circumstances of hunger, homelessness, and lack of health care he describes, however, West sees his upper- ‘middle class intellectual social position as entailing the ethical obligation to participate in the struggles of his fellow African Americans. 10. It is important, here, to recognize that to assert the predominance of bourgeois individual- ism is not to assert that all positions in the synchronic moment are reducible to the bourgeois. To understand Jameson’s argument, one must make a distinction between bourgeois con- sciousness (the dominant characteristic of which for Jameson is the persistence and privileg- ing of the category of the individual) and the class of people called the bourgeoisie. The former is a pan-class category which comes about as the result of the (false) universalization of a consciousness specific to the latter through the mass cultural structures of incorporation. This consciousness, in turn, is understood as a cultural dominant within the synchronic histor- ical moment. For a discussion of the concept of culturally dominant logic, see Chapter 1 of Jameson's Postmodernism. 11. See, for example, Aijaz Ahmad’s essay “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,” where he argues that Jameson’s Marxist dialectic constructs historical ideal types at a level of generality which occludes important differences among subjects, which causes him, in turn, to understate the presence of the collective impulse in present-day United States culture. For a response to Ahmad’s critique sce also Bumham. 12, While the sources of Jameson's Hegelian Marxism are numerous, regarding the relation- ship of theory to practice, the Frankfurt School is perhaps its most immediate precursor. One of the centrally defining features of Critical Theory is its rejection of the notion that the rele- vance of theory is contingent upon its applicability. Pertinent here too is its position toward Pragmatism in general. While the Frankfurt School shared with pragmatism the common goalMarxism, Morality, and the Politics of Desire 49 of social change, having lost its faith in the proletariat as the source of that change, its empha- sis was placed on praxis as the “long-term” working out of the unity of theory with human activity in the state of freedom. Their praxis took the form of intellectual labor devoted to the thinking of “the negative”—theoretical reflection based in the negation of existing “facts,” which pragmatism took as its starting ground and which, therefore, it “lacked the means of going beyond” (Jay 83). For more on the relationship of theory to praxis in the Frankfurt School, especially for Adomo, see Buck-Morss. REFERENCES Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.”” in Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992. 95-122 Bloch, Ernst. “Hope and Time: Theory-Praxis in the Long Run.” Ed. Ross Fitzgerald. The Sources of Hope. 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