The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

by Fredric Jameson

the “precursor” of a term in a system that does not yet exist. So it is said that Marxism mythically transforms elements of a precapitalist system (for example, commerce or merchant capital) into evolutionary forerunners of a more properly capitalist system which has not yet come into being and with which such elements have nothing whatsoever to do, either causally or functionally. But this is not at all what happens in Capital (nor in the works of Darwin, either, for whom a similar rectification ought to be undertaken some day). Diachronic representation in Marx is not constructed along those principles of continuity which have been stigmatized as Hegelian or evolutionary. Rather, the constructional model is quite different one, which Nietzsche was the first to identify and to designate as the genealogy. In genealogical construction, we begin with a fullblown system (capitalism in Marx, and in the present book, reification) in terms of which elements of the past can “artificially” be isolated as objective preconditions: genealogy is not a historical narrative, but has the essential function of renewing our perception of the synchronic system as in an x-ray, its diachronic perspectives serving to make perceptible the articulation of the functional elements of a given system in the present.

Marxism also functions as this “ruinization” of past concepts. The tie to a genealogy works here too because we are learning about the present through hindsight and a re-exploring of how things functioned. This is the historicizing process Jameson has been referring to. We read and reanalyze and find the root cause. We do not relabel things so much as find the symptom. Through Marxism, we do an analytical of not only text but of society itself. Literary analysis through Marxism is a means of analyzing how that cultural shift has developed over time. We need to being in history along with literary analysis. Holy fuck.