The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

by Fredric Jameson

Hence the bewildering fluidity of these narrative strings, in which human characters are ceaselessly transformed into animals or objects and back again; in which nothing like narrative “point of view,” let alone “identification” or “empathy” with this or that protagonist, emerges; in which not even the position of an individual storyteller or “sender” (destinataire) can be conceptualized without contradiction.

But if the emergence of narrative characters requires such social and historical preconditions, then the dilemmas of Propp and Greimas are themselves less methodological than historical ones; they result from projecting later categories of the individual subject back anachronistically onto narrative forms which precede the subject’s emergence when they do not unreflexively admit into the logic of their narrative analyses precisely those ideological categories that it was the secret purpose of later texts (for example, nineteenth-century novels) to produce and to project.

From a Marxist point of view, this experience of the decentering of the subject and the theories, essentially psychoanalytic, which have been devised to map it are to be seen as the signs of the dissolution of an essentially bourgeois ideology of the subject and of psychic unity or identity (what used to be called bourgeois “individualism”);

A history of romance as a mode becomes possible, in other words, when we explore the substitute codes and raw materials, which, in the increasingly secularized and rationalized world that emerges from the collapse of feudalism, are pressed into service to replace the older magical categories of Otherness which have now become so many dead languages.

The passage is significant, not because it expresses Manzoni’s personal opinion on the subject, but rather because it projects and blocks out a world of a determinate structure, a world in which moral essences exercise an active power at distance, in which character-emanation becomes a causal convention as plausible in this narrative as the magical curse or supernatural possession of oral tales. In such a world, we come to admit the baleful spell exuded by the Gothic fortress of l’Innominato, which broods over the landscape like the very promise of evil, and to believe in the healing power of Archbishop Federigo as he moves through an anarchic and plague-ridden countryside progressively touched by the grace that radiates from his person. In such a world, the climactic event is then conversion, and the old physical agon of the romances of chivalry is transformed into the struggle of Good and Evil for the individual soul.

Indeed, the older magical landscape, weakened into figures of speech, still clings to the wondrous sentences with which Stendhal notes the process, as in a similar situation in La Chartreuse: “La pensée du privilège avait desseche cette plante toujours si délicate qu’on nomme le bonheur.” Such passages do not so much document the originality of the contribution Stendhal felt he was making to the nascent “science” of psychology (or of idéologie, as his master Destutt de Tracy called it), but rather mark the rationalizing interiorization of the form by way of the assimilation of historically new types of content.

Wasteland as exteriorizationnof internal life. Genre fiction as a return to older story forms. Romance as a typing these type of a more psychoanalytical/modern form of storytelling

When, at the end of the nineteenth century, the search for secular equivalents seems exhausted, the characteristic indirection of a nascent modernism, from Kafka to Cortázar, circumscribes the place of the fantastic as a determinate, marked absence at the heart of the secular world:

Magic in the modern context is the absence of romance, a secularization of mystical forces

The unnatural neutrality of this vacant cityscape may stand as an emblem of the contemporary fantastic in general, its expectant hush revealing an object world forever suspended on the brink of meaning, forever disposed to receive a revelation of evil or of grace that never comes. The unpeopled streets, the oppressive silence, convey this absent presence like a word on the tip of your tongue or a dream not quite remembered, while for the subject himself, a succession of trivial and apparently insignificant feelings (the seltsamerweise that nags at Andreas’ attention, the sudden bursts of inexplicable humor—“Andreas war ärgerlich”) records the internal activity of a psyche buffeted by forebodings, and confirms Heidegger’s account of Stimmung as the privileged medium through which the worldness of world manifests itself.

The absence is abject/mystical/absurd/uncommon

But if epiphany itself is a mirage, then the most authentic vocation of romance in our time would not be that reinvention of the providential vision invoked and foretold by Frye, but rather its capacity, by absence and by the silence of the form itself, to express that ideology of desacralization by which modern thinkers from Weber to the Frankfurt School have sought to convey their sense of the radical impoverishment and constriction of modern life.

So the great expressions of the modern fantastic, the last unrecognizable avatars of romance as a mode,

draw their magical power from an unsentimental loyalty to those henceforth abandoned clearings across which higher and lower worlds once passed.

The power of the postmodernist text is the return and the absence of the moral landscape that regions romances represented and personified. It becomes an internal struggle and an internal means of awakening. The fantasy can be both the false consciousness of a bourgeois society and the dream of a Marxist utopia. It functions as both counterculture and status quo. Holy shit. This is my paper right here.

The evolutionary language Frye uses here clearly allows this series of identifications to be constructed and represented in the form of a micronarrative.

So in Frye’s passage, the function of the micronarrative is not to use the figure of Micawber as evidence for some “evolutionary” theory, but rather to permit a return to Micawber himself in such a way that we rewrite this character together with all his predecessors and descendants in the form of a new composite and multidimensional entity. The purpose is not to replace Micawber with his “original” in the dolosus servus, nor to dissolve him into Jeeves, but to produce a new narrative component which may be defined as a Micawber-considered-as-a dolosus-servus.

Ruinization of literary archetypes. They are not mystical counterpoints like Jung says, but are instead built on the ruins of another. Remove the metaphysical aspect of story figures and see them as an evolution. They are not developing so much as our understanding creates a new function of them. Our understanding makes hybrids of multiple figures. This complicates archetypes much more than necessary. But it works with the materialist viewpoint Jameson is working with here.

scandal of a peasant youth courting an aristocratic woman. The homosexual comedy distracts us from this more disturbing sociological anxiety, and is dismissed back into mere appearance when it comes time for us to learn, to our class relief, that the girl in question, far from being a noblewoman, was in reality merely the porter’s niece! These two related diachronic or intertextual constructs, then, allow us to reread the text, synchronically, as the coexistence, contradiction, structural hierarchy, or uneven development of a number of distinct narrative systems; and it is the possibility of such a reading which in turn allows us to grasp the text as a socially symbolic act, as the ideological—but formal and immanent—response to a historical dilemma.

Text as a relieving and a reinforcing of ideological stress. Art as a means for a society to reinforce its taboos and structures. Here he takes a queer reading and a gender/power reading of the text as means of making egalitarianism a means of comedy to undermine their validity.

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.

Comedy is active and articulates the play of desire and of the obstacles to it, whereas romance develops, as we have seen, under the sign of destiny and providence, and takes as its outer horizon the transformation of a whole world, ultimately sealed by those revelations of which the enigmatic Grail is itself the emblem. Comedy is social in its ultimate perspective, whereas romance remains metaphysical;

Dichotomy between romance and comedy can be applied to other genres as well, namely horror, sci fi, and fantasy. This has to have been done by other authors. Do research in genre theory and break down the more political structures of it.

Yet such psychoanalytic readings, although perfectly appropriate, should not be understood as diagnoses of these modes, but rather as new motifs and pretexts for a more thoroughgoing differential description of the two forms. In particular, the archaic fantasy material that psychoanalytic criticism feels able to detect in such forms can never be imagined as emerging in any pure state, but must always pass through a determinate social and historical situation, in which it is both universalized and reappropriated by “adult” ideology.

Psych analysis as a further ruinization or text.

The novel is then not so much an organic unity as a symbolic act that must reunite or harmonize hetereogeneous narrative paradigms which have their own specific and contradictory ideological meaning. It is at any rate the systematic interweaving of these two distinct generic modes—in later bourgeois society they will be definitively sundered from each other in the sealed compartments of the private and the public, the psychological and the social—which lends Manzoni’s book an appearance of breadth and variety, and a totalizing “completeness,” scarcely equaled elsewhere in world literature.

The novel acts as great social unifier. It acts as a means of showing proletariat concerns for a bourgeois audience.

“the logic of content”36: the semantic raw materials of social life and language, the constraints of determinate social contradictions, the conjunctures of social class, the historicity of structures of feeling and perception and ultimately of bodily experience, the constitution of the psyche or subject, and the dynamics and specific temporal rhythms of historicity.

As for romance, it would seem that its ultimate condition of figuration, on which the other preconditions we have already mentioned are dependent—the category of worldness, the ideologeme of good and evil felt as magical forces, a salvational historicity—is to be found in a transitional moment in which two distinct modes of production, or moments of socioeconomic development, coexist. Their antagonism is not yet articulated in terms of the struggle of social classes, so that its resolution can be projected in the form of a nostalgic (or less often, a Utopian) harmony. Our

Romance comes about in moments of turmoil, class conflict. The makes sense for bodice rippers and even the big R romantcpics coming out of the French Revolution. I wonder if this could be applied to Blake and what Blake does

while the great art-romances of the early nineteenth century take their variously reactive stances against the new and unglamorous social institutions emerging from the political triumph of the bourgeoisie and the setting in place of the market system.

The 17th romances is reactionary and deal with the developing of the capitalist power structure

But romance does its work well; under the spell of this wondrous text, the French Revolution proves to be an illusion, and the grisly class conflict of decades of Napoleonic world war fades into the mere stuff of bad dreams.

“Hegel’s Comic conception of history was based ultimately on his belief in the right of life over death; ‘life’ guaranteed to Hegel the possibility of an ever more adequate form of social life throughout the historical future. Marx carried this Comic conception even further; he envisioned nothing less than the dissolution of that ‘society’ in which the contradiction between consciousness and being had to be entertained as a fatality for all men in all times. It would not, then, be unjust to characterize the final vision of history which inspired Marx in his historical and social theorizing as a Romantic one. But his conception did not envisage humanity’s redemption as a deliverance from time itself. Rather, his redemption took the form of a reconciliation of man with a nature denuded of its fantastic and terrifying powers, submitted to the rule of technics, and turned to the creation of a genuine community.”

Indeed, the dream-fable at the heart of this novel is something like a repudiation of traditional epiphanies, or an autocritique of the storyteller’s earlier work: the darkened movie theater, the dream as discontinuous and edited as a Fritz Lang film, the message from the Cuban, whose repressed kerygma, from the first liberated territory of the Western hemisphere, slowly rises to the surface in the course of events: Wake up!

Bourgeois reality as dreamlike false consciousness. Class consciousness as an awakening to reality.

The novel is the end of genre in the sense in which it has been defined in the previous chapter: a narrative ideologeme whose outer form, secreted like a shell or exoskeleton, continues to emit its ideological message long after the extinction of its host.

Novel as ideological parasite. Novel as devoid of direct ideological processes?

estranging commonplaces against the freshness of some unexpected “real,” foregrounding convention itself as that through which readers have hitherto received their notions of events, psychology, experience, space, and time.

Novels create a "real" or a false consciousness

the secular “decoding,” of those preexisting inherited traditional or sacred narrative paradigms which are its initial givens.

Realism as "revealism" or a secularisation of previous romantic ideals

In this sense, the novel plays a significant role in what can be called a properly bourgeois cultural revolution—that immense process of transformation whereby populations whose life habits were formed by other, now archaic, modes of production are effectively reprogrammed for life and work in the new world of market capitalism.

Novel as signifier of bourgeois lifestyle

The problem of the subject is clearly a strategic one for both dimensions of the novelistic process, particularly if one holds, as Marxists do, that the forms of human consciousness and the mechanisms of human psychology are not timeless and everywhere essentially the same, but rather situation-specific and historically produced.

Marxism rejects the universal ideal of Man as it is a liberal concept and dehistoricizes present conditions

Such an evocation—in which the desire for a particular object is at one and the same time allegorical of all desire in general and of Desire as such, in which the pretext or theme of such desire has not yet been relativized and privatized by the ego-barriers that jealously confirm the personal and purely subjective experience of the monadized subjects they thus separate—may be said to reenact the Utopian impulse in the sense in which Ernst Bloch has redefined this term.

this essentially comic register of the narrative, is, then, presumably enough to account for a perspective in which the vicissitudes of carnal desire are observed with sympathetic detachment and malicious empathy.

With this virtually fullblown appearance of filmic point of view, however, the Utopian overtones and intensities of desire are ever more faintly registered by the text; and the Utopian impulse itself, now reified, is driven back inside the monad, where it assumes the status of some merely psychological experience, private feeling, or relativized value.

Realism and thr novel turn the utolic desire into something to be scorned abd something that can only be experienced on a private, "monadic" level instead of a cultural desire.

essentially to direct our reading attention toward the relationship between sexual potency and class affiliation.

Our reading “set” toward the social and historical interpretations which can be allegorically derived from the narrative is thus something like a lateral by-product of our initial attention to the sexual comedy; but this allegorical by-product, once established, reorients the narrative around its new interpretive center, retroactively returning upon the sexual farce to assign it a henceforth marginalized place in the narrative structure, where it comes to seem a relatively inessential or arbitrary “bonus of pleasure.”

the historical pensée sauvage, or what we have called the political unconscious, nonetheless seeks by logical permutations and combinations to find a way out of its intolerable closure and to produce a “solution,” something it can begin to do owing to the semic dissociations already implicit in the initial opposition formulated above.

the emergence of the subject from the essentially “analog” or wish-fulfilling thought of the mirror stage, the accession into language, with its digital thinking, its proper names, negatives, and above all

its “shifters” or empty pronominal slots in which transitory subjects can lodge in succession.

one: Sartre’s Search for a Method has taught us to read the family situation as the mediation of class relationships in society at large, and to grasp the parental functions as socially coded or symbolic positions as well.

But this moment—the production of the wish-fulfilling text—is not yet, according to Freud, the moment of genuine literary or cultural production, let alone that of “realism” in any sense this word can have. What it allows us to account for is the production of that quite different thing called ideology, which Althusser defines as “the imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her real conditions of existence.”

However, daydreaming and wish-fulfilling fantasy are by no means a simple operation, available at any time or place for the taking of a thought. Rather, they involve mechanisms whose inspection may have something further to tell us about the otherwise inconceivable link between wish-fulfillment and realism, between desire and history. It would seem, indeed, that the production of a whole ideology as a precondition for the indulgence of a specific daydream implies something like a reality principle or censorship within the latter. This peculiar dialectic, in which the desiring subject is forced to enumerate the objections to his or her Imaginary gratification in order to realize the latter even on the level of a daydream,

The Real is thus—virtually by definition in the fallen world of capitalism—that which resists desire, that bedrock against which the desiring subject knows the breakup of hope and can finally measure everything that refuses its fulfillment. Yet it also follows that this Real—this absent cause, which is fundamentally unrepresentable and non-narrative, and detectable only in its effects—can be disclosed only by Desire itself, whose wish-fulfilling mechanisms are the instruments through which this resistant surface must be scanned.

in European Realism, pp. 21–46.

Get this

Louis Althusser, “Freud and Lacan,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), p. 210.

Ideology necessarily implies the libidinal investment of the individual subject, but the narratives of ideology—even what we have called the Imaginary, daydreaming, or wish-fulfilling text—are equally necessarily collective in their materials and form.

culture or “objective spirit” of a given period is an environment peopled not merely with inherited words and conceptual survivals, but also with those narrative unities of a socially symbolic type which we have designated as ideologemes.

It would be a mistake to conclude that the ideologemes of a given period are more directly accessible to us in so-called popular literature or mass culture (where they have presumably been less subject to the transformations of the more specifically “literary” text); on the other hand, it is evident that a certain derivate literature is a potential storehouse of such materials, provided they are not too rapidly resolved into matters of “influence.”

I disagree here with saying that "literary" texts have more semiotic weight and structure than genre/popular texts. He is refuting the egalitarianism of art by assuming that one form of expression has more meaning than others.

These two paradigms, the sentimental and the melodramatic, which from the standpoint of ideology may be see as two distinct (but not mutually exclusive) narrative strategies, may be said to be the carrot and the stick of nineteenth-century middle-class moralizing about the lower classes.

These forms of art as means of belittiling classes.

Lumpenproletariat: unpolitical, apathetic working class

We will thus take the hand that flings the fateful acid as the schematic stenographic representation of a narrative gesture and an ideological fantasy more accessibly revealed and betrayed in the vengeful and monitory figure of Sue’s Parisian Harun-al-Rashid, Prince Rodolphe, whose mission in life is the scourging of criminals, evildoers, and villains mostly drawn from the poorer classes, as Marx observed in his lengthiest piece of literary criticism.2

The city therefore no longer functions as the molar unity of these narratives, as their outer emblem of “totality,” as the external sign of the meaningful unity of their social content.5 Naturalist narrative will substitute, for the older totalizing frameworks, a new classification of narrative material according to specialization, or the division of labor;