The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

by Fredric Jameson

The Political Unconscious accordingly turns on the dynamics of the act of interpretation and presupposes, as its organizational fiction, that we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself.

A text is not something that exists wholly out of context. It has origins and cannot be read removed from said context.

Rather, texts come before us as the always-already-read;

Texts exist as “ruination” as Deridda calls it. A text comes with its baggage from previous readers and cultural suppositions. A text exists with political history behind it from both creation and what we know about the text.

we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand-new—through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions.

Types of reading: 1) older texts have different readings attached to them. 2) newer texts relate to how we read older texts. Reading as conversation.

Interpretation is here construed as an essentially allegorical act, which consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code.

Master code? We read at hopes of unlocking? It being an allegorical act suggests that it already happens or reading is a symbolic act as well.

The identification of the latter will then lead to an evaluation of such codes or, in other words, of the “methods” or approaches current in American literary and cultural study today. Their juxtaposition with a dialectical or totalizing, properly Marxist ideal of understanding will be used to demonstrate the structural limitations of the other interpretive codes, and in particular to show the “local” ways in which they construct their objects of study and the “strategies of containment” whereby they are able to project the illusion that their readings are somehow complete and self-sufficient.

A Marxist reading is the best reading of text because it puts it in a historical reading of progression rather than the unsupported idea that texts are independent of one another.

These are inherently separated from a Marxist reading?

the authority of such methods springs from their faithful consonance with this or that local law of a fragmented social life, this or that subsystem of a complex and mushrooming cultural superstructure.

Other methods of reading only work because they are specialized in rules and logic. A Marxist reading is cultural encompassing and cross-cultural. This idea of metacommentary sounds a bit idealistic. I guess that’s the dialectic coming through.

Yet the very absence of such issues may serve as an implicit commentary on them; I have tried to maintain an essentially historicist perspective, in which our readings of the past are vitally dependent on our experience of the present, and in particular on the structural peculiarities of what is sometimes called the société de consommation (or the “disaccumulative” moment of late monopoly or consumer or multinational capitalism), what Guy Debord calls the society of the image or of the spectacle.

Modern/postmodern/contemporary readings require a knowledge of the past and cannot be removed from them. Inherently, this goes against deconstruction which has text as independent yet does not go against its original view of reading within context

Historiography as “concept of the past”

Look him up for later

Interpretation is not an isolated act, but takes place within a Homeric battlefield, on which a host of interpretive options are either openly or

implicitly in conflict.

in our context, only another, stronger interpretation can overthrow and practically refute an interpretation already in place.

Interpretation and analysis as combat, domination.

Adduced - to cite as evidence

Marxism, which, in the form of the dialectic, affirms a primacy of theory which is at one and the same time a recognition of the primacy of History itself.

Marxism as means to combine both the literary historical perspective and the analytical perspective. Marxism as means of historiography

This book will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts. It conceives of the political perspective not as some supplementary method, not as an optional auxiliary to other interpretive methods current today—the psychoanalytic or the myth-critical, the stylistic, the ethical, the structural—but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.

Reading must be read in a political context, this includes all forms of reading and interpretation

écriture.

only a genuine philosophy of history is capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day.

It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted 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 function and its necessity.

namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life.

The only effective liberation from such constraint begins with the recognition that there is nothing that is not social and historical—indeed, that everything is “in the last analysis” political.

The assertion of a political unconscious proposes that we undertake just such a final analysis and explore the multiple paths that lead to the unmasking of cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts.

All action as symbolic with political, unknown recourse.

thrust of the argument of the Anti-Oedipus

Oedipus is, to be sure, very much in the spirit of the present work, for the concern of its authors is to reassert the specificity of the political content of everyday life and of individual fantasy-experience and to reclaim it from that reduction to the merely subjective and to the status of psychological projection which is even more characteristic of American cultural and ideological life today than it is of a still politicized France.

There seems, for instance, to have been an unquestionable causal relationship between the admittedly extrinsic fact of the crisis in late nineteenth-century publishing, during which the dominant three-decker lending library novel was replaced by a cheaper one-volume format, and the modification of the “inner form” of the novel itself.10

Narrative changing with mechanical/technological structure

structural efforts at modeling the dominant episteme

terms of some deeper, underlying, and more “fundamental” narrative, of a hidden master narrative which is the allegorical key or figural content of the first sequence of empirical materials. This kind of allegorical master narrative would then include providential histories (such as those of Hegel or Marx), catastrophic visions of history (such as that of Spengler), and cyclical or Viconian visions of history alike.

it rewrote the latter in terms of the struggle of the physical elements with one another, or of the battle of vices and virtues.

Narrative rewritten to fit idealistic structure

Allegory is here the opening up of the text to multiple meanings, to successive rewritings and overwritings which are generated as so many levels and as so many supplementary interpretations.

Allegory as means of leveling readings. Superimposing allegory and layering it within the text. Levels of reading again

Althusser’s sense as a representational structure which allows the individual subject to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History.

Ideology of making personal narrative as whole experience Levels of reading in the medieval sense:

Anatomical: means of spiritual enlightenment

Is this a process or merely different types?

But in other kinds of analysis as well—the orthodox “ideological analyses” of philosophical positions or legal measures, or the demystification of the structure of the state in class terms—a movement of allegorical decipherment takes place in which the conception of class interest supplies the functional or link between a superstructural symptom or category and its “ultimately determining” reality in the base.

The conception of the political unconscious outlined in this book is an attempt to cut through this particular dilemma by relocating it within the object.

master narratives have inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them;

Master text both in the reading and in our act of reading.

such allegorical narrative signifieds are a persistent dimension of literary and cultural texts precisely because they reflect a fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality.

Master narratives shaping percepruibs of reality.

sauvage of a whole narrative production

antiteleological

Antiteleological: arguing against things having an end, resisting a final resolution

“resists symbolization absolutely”

The Real as outside of representative form

We would therefore propose the following revised formulation: that history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious. Such a reformulation acknowledges

History as the Real that cannot be accessed except through text. Political unconscious exists as means to reckon with history.

epiphenomenon

A secondary effect.

the state under capitalism as a locus for class struggle and political action, rather than a mere obstacle which one “smashes.”20

Capitakist state as mindset and concept of struggle more than just a physical state.

is the text a free-floating object in its own right, or does it “reflect” some context or ground, and in that case does it simply replicate the latter ideologically, or does it possess some autonomous force in which it could also be seen as negating that context? It

“Ideological State Apparatuses”)

Look this up

mediation: that is, the relationship between the levels or instances, and the possibility of adapting analyses and findings from one level to another.

The space between levels? Like modes of production?

Mediation is the classical dialectical term for the establishment of relationships between, say, the formal analysis of a work of art and its social ground, or between the internal dynamics of the political state and its economic base.

autonomy and functioning as an expression of its homologues.

Mediation is wbere levels cross over and become mixed. The gray space between autonomous levels

mediation has traditionally been the way in which dialectical philosophy and Marxism itself have formulated their vocation to break out of the specialized compartments of the (bourgeois) disciplines and to make connections among the seemingly disparate phenomena of social life generally.

The attack on mediation between modes of production destroys the bourgeois idea that things are divided, modes of production as proletariat

(language, as Talleyrand put it, having been given us in order to conceal our thoughts).