The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

by Fredric Jameson

would argue that the problem of a functional or instrumental conception of culture is basically transcended and annulled in the Utopian perspective which is ours here. In a classless society, Rousseau’s conception of the festival as the moment in which society celebrates itself and its own unity, Durkheim’s analogous conception of the unifying “function” of religion, and our own view of culture as the expression of a properly Utopian or collective impulse are no longer basely functional or instrumental in Sahlins’ sense. This is to say, if one likes, that Durkheim’s view of religion (which we have expanded to include cultural activity generally) as a symbolic affirmation of human relationships, along with Heidegger’s conception of the work of art as a symbolic enactment of the relationship of human beings to the nonhuman, to Nature and to Being, are in this society false and ideological; but they will know their truth and come into their own at the end of what Marx calls prehistory. At that moment, then, the problem of the opposition of the ideological to the Utopian, or the functional-instrumental to the collective, will have become a false one.