Remarks on Jameson and Language

The media, for once, are getting it right: with the announcement of Fredric Jameson’s passing on September 22, one often sees a likeable photo of an engaged, outer-directed, smiling and welcoming, if prodigious and awe-inspiring scholar and critic in early or late days of his notable life and career. There is something of the Peaceable Kingdom in the intellectual devotion and worldly accomplishments evoked: “For Fredric Jameson, Marxist Criticism Was a Labor of Love,” per The New York Times. While Critical Theory, in both nature and practice, accentuates the negative, Late Jameson presents a beneficent gaze that is rarely encountered—especially with Marxists. The Grand Narrative of Progress Toward a Better Life seems activated by his very presence, a moment of positivity restored at the moment of loss.

There is, as one of many supporting narratives, a not-insignificant history of Jameson and Language writing that also conveys this beneficent gaze, though it is often obscured. It is not generally thought, otherwise put, that Jameson was sympathetic to Language writing; his treatment of Bob Perelman’s “China,” as readers of the “Postmodernism” essay know, was beyond dismissive. Perelman’s poem was “symptomatic,” perhaps the original “symptom” itself, of capitalism’s dissociation of sensibility in the depthless onslaught of simulacra, right out of Blade Runner. The recent turn to “surface reading,” in opposition to Marxist hermeneutics, could do worse than to return to Perelman’s poem for its interpretive depth. As archival research establishes, Jameson took the version of the poem he critiques not from its book publication in Primer (This Press, 1981), but from its co-publication with Bruce Boone’s essay “Language Writing: The Plusses and Minuses of the New Formalism,” in Steve Abbott’s Soup magazine (no. 2, 1981). The telltale evidence that Jameson used this version is in the elision of the last word, “too,” which misreads the gestural and thus more affective connotations of “Time to wake up. / But better get used to dreams too” (“China,” Primer, 62).

Kaplan Harris and Rob Halpern have written at length on this episode as foundational for a Language/New Narrative “split”  dating to that moment (recovered with the later rise of Queer Theory, which motivates the dichotomy; see Harris, “The Small Press Traffic School of Dissimulation,” here). But there is more extensive history, one that does not just end with New Narrative as the Jamesonian response to depthless simulacra. It is the case that when Jameson was teaching at UC Santa Cruz in the late 70s and early 80s he met Bruce Boone as part of a summer Marxist Study Group; Boone was at the time in an intense debate with Ron Silliman in another reading group—one heard of dramatic and intractable debates between Boone and Silliman, who fiercely held their positions. In this period, Jameson was frequenting the San Francisco literary and gay scenes; he shows up as a character in Bob Glück’s Jack the Modernist (1984; “set in San Francisco in 1981”) as an academic named “Martin,” which readers confirm is him. Jameson was thus in the mix of the Boone/Silliman rivalry; he was hearing about Language writing about the time Steve Abbott wrote about it in Poetry Flash and, later, continued the debate in Soup (see my account of that period here). By affiliation, Jameson was friendly toward New Narrative, and skeptical of Language.

As he well might have been: The Prison-House of Language appeared from Princeton University Press in 1972; it would have been out on booksellers’ tables at the same time that the first translations of the Russian Formalists were available (notably Richard Sheldon’s A Sentimental Journey [1971] and Mayakovsky and His Circle [1972]; more scholarly works also were out, such as Ladislav Metejka and Kristina Pomorska’s Readings in Russian Poetics [1971]). What was interesting at the time was not Jameson’s Sartrean/Lukácsian dismissal of formalism and structuralism but that there were political stakes to such a reading. In retrospect, Jameson tilted toward the negative, with a rivalrous gaze toward Russian/French poetics that he, as belated American, was charged both to explain and critique. Of course, Jameson could not have simply meant a positive/negative dichotomy but was engaged in a dialectic it would take further historical turns to work out. My move in the game, to speak immodestly, was to take up the cause of the Russian avant-garde and formalism in a contribution to Bob Perelman’s talk series in 1979, under the title “Russian Formalism and the Present,” which would become the first chapter of Total Syntax (1984). In my archive files, I find (just now) that the notes for the talk were from Matejka and Pomorska’s Readings in Russian Poetics and—from Jameson’s Prison-House. I will have to consult my notes and marked copy to find out just how skeptically I was reading Jameson, but it led to a strong endorsement of Russian Formalism as a identified platform for our group. While I credited Matejka and Pomorska in the index, Jameson is not there; thus, his book was a prod to defend the critical tradition (Language vs. narrative) I was endorsing.

There is more on the two-way street between Jameson and Language. In 1981, while Bob Perelman was continuing to organize talks at 80 Langton Street, Fred was invited and presented what I believe was the first version of the “Postmodernism” essay. This claim will need to be fact checked, but due to the reference to Perelman there is no doubt it was written in the midst of Language/Narrative debates. From the 80 Langton Catalogue of that year, we find that Jameson spoke in the same series as David Plotke, whose essay “Language and Politics Today” appeared in Poetics Journal 1 (1981) and Mary Louise Pratt. The latter’s Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1975) raised quite a ruckus from the Langton audience; I remember her responding “Guys, guys!” as Tom Mandel and company dug in. Writers in that season were no less world-historical: Ted Berrigan, Kathy Acker, Lorenzo Thomas, Jerome Rothenberg, and Lyn Hejinian. Another moment to call for a better literary and artistic history of that period than we have seen so far (here)! I did not attend Jameson’s lecture, which may have been co-curated with Ron Silliman, but I heard that it was well-attended and received. Kathy Acker’s presentation about the same time was also Jamesonian; I recall wall-high projections of the simulacral image of Pres. Jimmy Carter as authoritarian that she undermined with her text. Even earlier, in 1979 as writer-in-residence, I presented the central essay for what would become Total Syntax, “The Work in the World,” and staged an image/language performance piece using four slide projectors titled “Reverse Maps.” The theory of “cognitive mapping” under conditions of postmodernity, the last section of Jameson’s essay, was not yet on the table, but the ideas were in the mix and available.

Other poetic moments of Jameson-in-Language have been missed, due to the privileging of Language/Narrative. One is his momentary appearance in Poets Theater, where in Kit Robinson’s play “Collateral” (1981) a character named “Jameson” makes a speech that ought to be quoted in its entirety:

Jameson (reading): “The path of art is a torturous path, on which your feet feel each stone, a path that winds back and forth. Word goes together with word, one word rubs against an other like a cheek against another’s cheek. Words are separated from words, and instead of a single complex, an automatically pronounced expression that shoots out like a candy bar from a dispenser, there comes into being a word as sound, a word which is purely articulated movement, a movement which you feel, or better still, a movement so constructed that you have to feel it as such.”
Dumas: They had being. Stop. [citation t/k]

Here “Jameson” rehearses the turn to language and performs it as a parody—a moment of faux intellectual heroism by a portentous professor-buffoon. The fact that he was being intimately skewered in this manner meant he was regarded as not exactly “one of us” but at least a distant relative, no matter how outré. A second influence occurs with Carla Harryman’s critique of narrative in work from the early 1980s, for instance the lead paragraph in “Property” (Tuumba, 1981):

“Come you are a mad revolutionary,” said her uncle with a smile. He pointed at the wildflowers. “My vision of the aspects I more or less fortunately rendered was, exactly, my knowledge. Anything nature puts in the sea comes up. A fierce man’s rainbow is in his head. If there is no Spain? If there is no Oakland? The original field, once cultivated, returns to high weeds where privacy is absolute. The shape of the story ought to be that of a spiral of doubt. The landscape demolishes the house in our heads. The conclusion is a point of departure for the speculator, but the spectacle is lacking in furniture. The pack of lies is insulted. The song is sung but where do we get the words compelling us to repeat it? My blood runs cold at the sight of death so I tell the story. If the wide obtuse inside is a yardstick in this sanctuary, perhaps the universe views the world like I see a two-dollar bill abandoned in a cashbox. Kiss my ass.” He stood up straight. (“Property,” in Animal Instincts, 15)

Harryman’s critique of narrative takes up Jameson’s use of pastiche (not identical to simulacrum) in the postmodern; any narrateme might be a “two-dollar bill abandoned in a cashbox,” negotiable only as a sign of something missing or not there. The opening to a skeptical critique of narrative, not its affective reinvestment, is the point—affirming the productivity of Jameson’s “prison-house” metaphor.

A third poetic influence occurs in Bob Perelman’s work in the 1980s, locked in a dialectical contest with Jameson, especially after the “Postmodernism” essay. The beginning of this series can be found the collection Primer, which I edited, designed, and published in, again, 1981. For the cover, I used cut-up xeroxes of schematic diagrams of phonemes found in a linguistics textbook, somewhat topsy-turvy but connected in a horizontal line—to visualize while ironizing a “speech chain.” Such complexity rhymed with the contents of Primer, where Perelman tried to spell out the postmodern “turn to language” to an imagined naïve interlocutor. In this sequence, he even seems to go as far as locating “language” as a constraint we are consigned to and cannot break out of, after Jameson’s Prison-House:

The language has us by the throat.
Scorched utensils in a grid. . . .

Say I say sky, say the city
Of San Francisco sits beneath that.
Have you ever seen a school fence?
A sun set? Field of speech
The anatomizing phonemes back at.

A machine shop? [. . . ; “Trainee,” Primer, 15]

The paradoxical figure of language turning inside out and addressing itself, more or less the ultimate narcissism, for Perelman becomes a potentially explosive method in that it ground interpretation in the most unstable and indeterminate relationship between language and referent. “A machine shop?”—or, summarizing in a later poem, “I called the phonemes / A thousand names. Speechless / Thoughts answered each” (“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” 21). It is not too much to see Jameson’s late concern with allegory as the mutable but final horizon of interpretation in the paradoxical hardwiring of opposite meanings at the crux between signifer and signified. Perelman thoroughly ironizes his own proficiency at demonstrating this relationship, being to a degree infantalized by it (“Primer”; “Trainee”; “Mature Ejaculation” are titles), thus demanding he move forward—toward world and meaning, no matter how destabilized. The next several books in Perelman’s oeuvre follow this paradox, from To the Reader to The First World, in an attempt to escape the “Prison-House of Language” that in retrospect appears Jamesonian:

All the furniture in Furniture World, U.S.A.,
All my life on tv “first thing in the morning.”
My head is, somewhere, in my head. Say, threaten,
Volunteer, want, all take the infinitive.
First sentence: The woman’s clothes volunteered
To mean the woman’s body. Biology
Is hardlt the word. No irony no misleading
Emphasis, just a smooth, hard, glossy desktop.
The President was “on the ceiling.”
He could watch himself face down on the faceless forces of history
[. . . ; “Seduced by Analogy, ” To the Reader {1984}]

To this point, the Jameson/Language dialectic has focused on the provocation of The Prison-House of Language, on the one hand, and the debate around Language writing in San Francisco, on the other. The second great wave of influence begins with the 1981 publication of The Political Unconscious—which Jameson would have been thinking through in this intellectually and creatively charged moment. I will continue the discussion in the next post, then, with the “turn to history” after The Political Unconscious, which Perelman’s poem indicates is just around the corner.