Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (1)

 THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS was a must-read when I was in graduate school, up there with Discipline and Punish, and I gather Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism was a must-read about ten years later, when I was the home stretch of getting tenure. Now I am on the brink of retirement, without much idea of what grad students are finding exciting. Are they now making their way through this, highlighter in hand? Or has everyone given up and gone for an MBA?

Jameson reminds me of Augustine, partly because he is very smart, partly because he has read everything, but mainly because he won't cave. Back in 410 CE, when the Visigoths took Rome, the capital of Christendom, any number of doomsayers could have said and did say, "Well, I guess that's it. for Christianity." Not Augustine, who wrote City of God to prove that Christianity did not depend on anything so subject to destruction and decay as a man-built metropolis. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed and China turned into whatever it now is, any number of cynics could have said and did say that Marxism was exhausted as an intellectual force. Jameson didn't even blink. 

And in this book Jameson re-animates the four-fold method of interpretation that Augustine discussed in On Christian Doctrine and that became a staple in the Middle Ages: literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical. (James credits Origen rather than Augustine, but in my medieval lit seminar back in the early eighties, Augustine was the man). 

The four methodologies produce four different readings (the Exodus story is a literal historical record, but also provides a lesson in the conduct of one's life, and furthermore foreshadows the ministry of the Christ as well as indicating God's great plan of salvation), but the beauty of the thing is that the four stack up without any sense of contradiction or conflict. They are non-identical, but all count as true.

In much the same way, Jameson is proposing (I think), that we can have our cultural artifact, its New Critical formal unpacking, its psychoanalytical reading, and its Marxist reading all stacking together and available for discussion, without feeling any particular anxiousness about the rightness of one approach implying the wrongness of another.

Rather than another attempt at squaring the circle by rigging up a Freud-Marx synthesis, Jameson's proposal invites us to let them amicably co-exist. Jameson cites Badiou on this point, saying "each one becomes its own Absolute, allowing us to affirm alternatively that everything is political or that everything is psychoanalytic."