The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

by Fredric Jameson

There is no need to rehearse at length the ideological content of philanthropy, which seeks a nonpolitical and individualizing solution to the exploitation which is structurally inherent in the social system, and whose characteristic motifs of cultural improvement and education are only too familiar.9 What is interesting about Gissing is that he is locked into this program at the same time that he sees through it and arraigns it violently, oscillating between an implacable denunciation of the reformist-philanthropists and an equally single-minded indictment of the “poor” who cannot thus be rescued or elevated.

This is the situation in which the great realistic novelists, “shepherds of Being” of a very special, ideological type, are forced, by their own narrative and aesthetic vested interests, into a repudiation of revolutionary change and an ultimate stake in the status quo.

the proletarian novel, demonstrates what happens when the representational apparatus is confronted by that supreme event, the strike as the figure for social revolution, which calls social “being” and the social totality itself into question,

the Sollen, the mesmerization of duty and ethical obligation, necessarily perpetuates a cult of failure and a fetishization of pure, unrealized intention.

It is, in other words, as if in a universe of high reification and increasingly massive commodification, the “being” of things and institutions and the increasingly reified place and role of human subjects within them weigh so heavily upon the narrative imagination that shifts in register and the modal variation of destinies are no longer linguistic possibilities for the serious artist.

Likewise, the modalities of the Imaginary and of wish-fulfillment or desire find new institutionalization in the subgenres produced by emergent mass culture: gothics, adventure and myth, science fiction, and detective stories.

The utopian novel exists within this genre of flights of fancy novels, genres as moralization of art

these seemingly separate and homogeneous zones of social space become interesting for the novelist only when they are intersected by characters from the other class, by class interlopers or refugees, defectors or missionaries.

But the theme of the alienated intellectual cannot properly be understood until it has been semantically restored to its full expressive value as an ideologeme.

John Goode suggests that the defects of Demos spring from its structural incapacity to register the future, and that they are therefore at one with the situation which dictates Morris’ reinvention of a Utopian or science-fiction form—the insufficiency of an empirical present for the representation of socialist forces which aim at the transformation of that present.

Socialist realism sci fi cannot embrace the movements of now and instead focuses on the planned future.

In Conrad we can sense the emergence not merely of what will be contemporary modernism (itself now become a literary institution), but also, still tangibly juxtaposed with it, of what will variously be called popular culture or mass culture, the commercialized cultural discourse of what, in late capitalism, is often described as a media society.

But this institutional heterogeneity—not merely a shift between two narrative paradigms, nor even a disparity between two types of narration or narrative organization, but a shift between two distinct cultural spaces, that of “high” culture and that of mass culture—is not the only gap or discontinuity that Lord Jim symptomatically betrays. Indeed, we will have occasion to isolate the stylistic practice of this work as a virtually autonomous “instance” in its own right, standing in tension or contradiction with the book’s various narrative instances or levels—just

these now find themselves positioned in the distinct and generally incompatible spaces of the institutions of high literature and what the Frankfurt School conveniently termed the “culture industry,” that is, the apparatuses for the production of “popular” or mass culture.

I understand why there is an opposition for mass culture as it represents culture as created for consumption. But I think we constantly negate the revolutionary ability of mass culture and subculture in lieu of more “pure”—ie white and accepted into academic, pedantic spaces— culture. Here I can set my contradiction not only with Jameson but with the Frankfurt school

We have already implicitly touched on two of these: the “romance” or mass-cultural reading of Conrad as a writer of adventure tales, sea narratives, and “popular” yarns; and the stylistic analysis of Conrad as a practitioner of what we will shortly term a properly “impressionistic” will to style.

It is appropriate, however, that our reading draw on momentum already acquired, and that we should initially return to the problem of narrative totality and framing devices or strategies of containment developed in previous chapters, which may be expected to take on new and original forms in Conrad’s work.

The conception of the political unconscious developed in the preceding pages has tended to distance itself, at certain strategic moments, from those implacably polemic and demystifying procedures traditionally associated

Marxist practice of ideological analysis. It is now time to

But in the Marxian system, only a collective unity—whether that of a particular class, the proletariat, or of its “organ of consciousness,” the revolutionary party—can achieve this transparency; the individual subject is always positioned within the social totality (and this is the sense of Althusser’s insistence on the permanence of ideology).

At one pole, hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of a meaning addressed to me in the manner of a message, a proclamation, or as is sometimes said, a kerygma; according to the other pole, it is understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion…. The situation in which language finds itself today comprises this double possibility, this double solicitation and urgency: on the one hand, to purify discourse of its excrescences, liquidate the idols, go from drunkenness to sobriety, realize our state of poverty once and for all; on the other hand, to use the most “nihilistic,” destructive, iconoclastic movement so as to let speak what once, what each time, was said, when meaning appeared anew, when meaning was at its fullest. Hermeneutics seems to me to be animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen: vow of rigor, vow of obedience. In our time we have not finished doing away with idols and we have barely begun to listen to symbols.

all these formulations hint at a variety of options for articulating a properly Marxian version of meaning beyond the purely ideological.

Marxism as finding the topic within fiction and culture that is clouded by the media. It makes an ideal, a material metaphysical

the study of the media and mass culture in contemporary society, must otherwise rest on a peculiarly unconvincing notion of the psychology of the viewer, as some inert and passive material on which the manipulatory operation works. Yet it does not take much reflection to see that a process of compensatory exchange must be involved here, in which the henceforth manipulated viewer is offered specific gratifications in return for his or her consent to passivity. In other words, if the ideological function of mass culture is understood as a process whereby otherwise dangerous and protopolitical impulses are “managed” and defused, rechanneled and offered spurious objects, then some preliminary step must also be theorized in which these same impulses—the raw material upon which the process works—are initially awakened within the very text that seeks to still them.

Viewer as active participant in media, not an impassive watcher. Kind of disagree given the lack of class consciousness in some, but maybe a call to action is needed

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.

Benjamin’s formulation comes as a rebuke and a warning against the facile reappropriation of the classics as humanistic expressions

of this or that historically “progressive” force. It comes, finally, as an appropriate corrective to the doctrine of the political unconscious which has been developed in these pages, reasserting the undiminished power of ideological distortion that persists even within the restored Utopian meaning of cultural artifacts, and reminding us that within the symbolic power of art and culture the will to domination perseveres intact.