Fredric Jameson’s Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization is now available from Verso Books.
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If the late Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson is to be believed, contemporary literary criticism remains relevant to radical projects for social change. In the face of debilitating global fragmentation and what can seem like complete political intractability, socially transformative reading practices may help us to reckon with, or at least better see, the present as its own distinct historical moment.
In his 2024 collection Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization (Verso Books), Jameson turns again to the novel, a form that, molded out of experiences and fantasies within the historical present, comes to serve as “time’s relief map, its furrows and spurs marking the intrusion of history into individual lives or else its tell-tale silences,” as he puts it. The essays collected therein grasp a series of novels—and, in chapter 5, one TV show, The Wire, though we are assured this has novelistic qualities—as “archaeological transcription[s]” of a “profound historicality.” Through them we “begin to hear, however faintly, the voices of contemporaries.”
It’s in this light that Jameson responds to the French poet Mallarmé’s adage (also the epigraph to this collection) that “…a present does not exist […] absent the voice of the Multitude, absent—everything. Poorly advised, those who would declare themselves their own contemporaries.” It is not that we should attempt to discover the present, absent everything; rather, our approach to the present ought to take the form of an intervention that is forged out of everything. The historical present lies in the collective recognition of our global situation, and the effort to change it.
But taking Jameson as a guide to these matters is not straightforward, and perhaps a little contentious. Owing to his lifelong productivity, with nearly thirty books and countless essays and articles published under his name, tracing the path of his thinking can involve untangling some complex knots. This review has used the phrase “late Marxist,” intentionally stoking ambiguity. Jameson is of course a Marxist who has recently died, in September of last year, after an extraordinarily productive career as a leading figure in criticism. But Jameson also saw himself as a “late Marxist” in a different sense, as he makes clear in his book on the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, which is titled Late Marxism, Or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (1990).
That text has been both derided and defended for the fact that, in many ways, its idiosyncratic approach says as much or more about Jameson than it does about Adorno. The controversies and ambiguities of Late Marxism stand in marked contrast to the book that first established Jameson’s significant place in scholarly discourse, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971), in which one finds a comparatively more orthodox treatment of Adorno—alongside Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Sartre and others—as part of a general effort ongoing at the time to defend the Hegelian and Marxist dialectical traditions over the then-dominant formalism of the New Criticism.
These efforts would be expanded upon a decade later in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), and formed the backbone of Jameson’s response to the idea of “postmodernism.” In his hands, this became a sustained means of theorizing the present state of globalized capitalism that has by now exceeded the bounds envisioned in his landmark New Left Review article, “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984) and the 1990 book of the same name.
Late Marxism was proffered as a response to the difficulty of thinking and moving beyond capitalism in the context of postmodernism, which is taken by Jameson to refer to the almost complete penetration of our world and consciousness by commodity logic. He apparently engages with Adorno because of the peculiar capacity of the latter for grasping this present: “the special relevance of Adorno’s Marxism, and of its unique capacities within our own equally unique ‘late’ or third stage of capitalism.” The eccentricities of Jameson’s treatment, for better or worse, arise from this overwhelming concern. That’s what Jameson takes to be some sort of late Marxism.
Yet if it is with such concerns that Jameson’s own late Marxism stands or falls, readers (of the critical variety, at least) find themselves faced with tricky questions. Not least among them is the fact that much has changed since the 1980s, when Jameson made his now notorious statement on so-called postmodernism. Indicative of these changes is the suspicion with which the terminology of postmodernism is today regarded, and the perception that it is somehow inadequate to refer to the qualities of our present. Jameson (tactically?) avoids mentioning it in his three-page introduction (the only new material that appears in Inventions of a Present, written specifically for the collection), though in a sense he did not really need to, given the centrality of the concept to Jameson’s career and its regular appearance in the essays collected here.
Either way, few of Jameson’s doubters will be contented by the fact that for him, postmodernism and globalization have long referred to much the same thing. In fact, he has been suggesting as much since his original theorizations of postmodernity—as in the little-known 1984 essay, “Rimbaud and the Spatial Text,” which has been republished in The Modernist Papers (2007)—and since then engaged regularly with the terms together, most notably in several extended essays in the 1990s, many of which have been collected in The Valences of the Dialectic (2009).
For many, things have changed so much since the 1980s that the historical challenges that emerged then may now be unrecognizable to us. Haven’t the wheels of capitalism continued to steam ahead, the furnace stoked by a dominant neoliberalism that remains oblivious to the approaching chasm of social and ecological disaster? For readers of the late Marxist Jameson, this all perhaps comes down simply to the question of whether his own supposedly late Marxism ought to pass with him, or if it may serve us still in our understanding of the present. Is it tied irrevocably to the debates around postmodernism—and have the shifts in scholarly fashion rendered Jameson’s theorizations obsolete? Or does Jameson’s work in fact provide a valuable map to the present? In this context, the publication of Inventions of a Present may well prove timely, at least insofar as it presents us with a test case for Jameson’s effort to think the form of globalization that we remain saddled with.
The 19 essays collected in the volume span some 50 years (1972–2022), taking us from just after Jameson’s breakthrough in Marxism and Form through to almost the very end of his career. As a consequence, there is a greatest-hits quality to the collection. Several chapters have been published already, appearing elsewhere, sometimes more than once: for example, Fear and Loathing in Globalization (chapter 14), Jameson’s response to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), has appeared in the collection of essays that append Jameson’s book on sci-fi and utopia, Archaeologies of the Future (2005), as well as The Ancients and the Postmoderns (2015). Perhaps Jameson felt it necessary that we read it once a decade to be reminded that science fiction “is sending back more reliable information about the contemporary world than an exhausted realism (or an exhausted modernism either),” especially the “global cyberpunk” in which “technological speculation and fantasy of the old Toffler sort takes second place to the more historically original vocation of a mapping of the new geopolitical Imaginary.”
While readers may value these reprintings, they could also be forgiven for being frustrated with the scant evidence of a developed editorial argument in Inventions of the Present around the selection and arrangement of the essays. This often proved to be the case with the later Jameson; since the 1990s, his books tended to consist of essay collections of this sort, with varying coherence.
Still, it may be granted that Inventions of a Present does not assemble the essays entirely at random. The first and by far the longest chapter, which reviews James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) and Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), provides something akin to a methodological defense of what follows. In the past, “vulgar” Marxist criticism was frequently chided for its ostensible disinterest in literature as such, and for what critics deemed an eagerness to be politically sanctimonious. Jameson insists that criticism be attentive to literary artifacts as creative responses to a situation, and that these two strands be grasped together immanently. This allows for the political to be found in what is properly pre-political; namely, in our overwhelmingly regressive culture, which is “no more than liberal in its conceptual content, when not downright conservative—which is to say, in both these cases, profoundly middle class in its ideological focus.”
With this methodological premise established, readers are left to seek out the thematic correspondences between and across chapters, encouraged perhaps by Jameson’s introductory remarks on the centrality of the dissolution of modernist novels, the emergence of world literature, and the question of the future. These are some of the many fragmentary consequences of the contemporary novel’s supposed effort to think the present historically:
“[W] hat is new and distinctive about the novel today, what is historically unique about the emergent situation of the works discussed here, is that they try to write the collective or at least register the crisis of the individual attempting to do so. […] to read these records and these symptoms with any accuracy demands a kind of formalism, provided it is a social or better still a materialist formalism capable of detecting the profound historicality of which these works are an archaeological transcription.”
In this vein, we might be tempted to twist things around and focus on the form of Jameson’s essays. But this approach too might be frustrated, as the assembly is disjointedly non-chronological: the first three essays, for instance, were respectively published in 1972, 1993, and 2015, before the fourth returns us to 1984.
The consequent succession of stylistic shifts in prose are likely to register as so many jolts for the reader, and the ordering decisions here are not fully explicable by reference to Jameson’s remarks on the various subterranean groupings. But perhaps the reader might think back on what was transpiring outside the text and “restore [the] historical context” in which these essays can be read together. This context is, of course, nothing less than Jameson’s ostensible concern: globalization, and our own contemporary cultural position—the sense that these fragmentary narratives somehow actually come together in a larger collective experience of history, even though that history often evades our understanding.
Such is the “spatial dilemma confronted by temporary fiction in the ‘world system’” that Jameson addresses in chapter 4, as he introduces his treatment of Don DeLillo’s The Names (1982) and Sol Yurick’s Richard A (1981). “That dilemma,” Jameson continues, “can be schematically described as the increasing incompatibility between individual experience, existential experience, as we go on looking for it in our individual biological bodies, and structural meaning, which can now ultimately derive only from the world system of multinational capitalism,” where the “social frame” is so much further from individual perception than in earlier periods.
The novelty of this situation is that “the principle of structural intelligibility is for the first time virtually completely invisible to the individual subjects whose lives it organizes;” the “world system operates on a tonal or perceptual level beyond the capacity of the individual human body.” From this proceeds Jameson’s symptomatic reading, his effort to show how this global condition accounts for the fact that these “enormously gifted writers,” even though they “venture into the area of socio-historical and economic explanation of what happens to people in our world,” end up producing results that are “abstract and nonnarrative.”
Other authors’ solutions vary according to their place in the globalized world. Günter Grass’ 1995 novel Ein weites Feld, we are told in chapter 7, staged a return to the political “after the triumph of capital,” causing outrage when so many were hoping to return to the “untroubled cultivation of the aesthetic as such […] to adorn and distinguish a prosperous bourgeoisie ready to take up its duties and privileges where they had been broken off when class struggle and fascism reared their ugly heads.” The enormous dimensions of Grass’s novel—which adopts a critical East German view on the period from the fall of the Berlin wall through to reunification, with forays into German history from the 19th-century Wars of Liberation—does not offer “the celebration or even the invention of the Event,” but rather a “catalogue of paths and little walks through Berlin.” Grass, says Jameson, had rediscovered the “travelogue” tradition of the novel, with its precedent in the Odyssey. Thereby “the older Prussia is drawn back into the so-called West, with effects as yet unforeseeable.”
For Jameson, authors like Grass, with their anti-Western and anti-American orientation, underscore the universality of globalization by their very marginality. The alienation of the perspective makes the whole visible—not because it can account for all of its elements, but precisely because it cannot. Through such a limitation, the totality of the situation structures the effort to grasp it. It’s by observing the singular result of this structure (here, a particular novel) that we come to observe the situation in its effects.
This is the logic behind Jameson’s critical enthusiasm for marginality, which leads to him sympathizing with novelistic efforts to think the present that do not appease the Anglophone literary establishment (or even many readers at all). Indeed, Kenzaburō Oe’s Somersault (1999), the subject of chapter 11, was critically panned by American and English reviewers. Somersault “tells the story of the attempt by its founder to resurrect a religious cult he has himself discredited and virtually destroyed.” Throughout, “the mechanics of group formation—assembling mailing lists, scheduling meetings, renting meeting places and deciding the order of business—seem to take precedence over the content of the particular religion.”
Having established this, Jameson situates Somersault in relation to the “new regionalism” within Oe’s novels (almost all of which stage a return to his native valley of Shikoku), which is “no surprise in the era of globalization, where the local tends to constitute an inevitable protest against urban standardization and the destruction of nature and the peasantry (or farmers) by agribusiness.” Though this regionalism “tends to organize itself into an ideology and a compensatory fantasy rather than a political program,” Oe’s The Silent Cry (1967) had already taught us that “we must grasp ‘the power of the land’ as the recovery of history.” Likewise, Somersault “adds a new post-Aum layer to a series of historical strata that reach all the way back to a pre-Meiji Shikoku peasant uprising, proceeding from there through the new imperial dispensation down to the village turmoil at the end of World War II.”
Elsewhere, we grasp our present through its (imagined) collapse in the future, as in Inventions of a Present’s shortest chapter, where Jameson reviews Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), a dystopic vision of the “global nature future.” In contrast to Atwood’s earlier entry into the series, Oryx and Crake (2003), which presented “the view of this [dystopian] system from the inside,” The Year of the Flood “gives us the view from below.” We perceive here “the breakdown of modern capitalist society into the various private contractors to whom social needs are outsourced, and behind them the enormous corporations that have replaced all the traditional forms of government.” For Jameson, our own situation is brought into relief as Atwood presents us a world in which:
“[T]he term American is no longer necessary. Its colours have a loathsome pastel quality, like drugstores; its bunny suits and fluffy fabrics reflect the bad taste of infantile mass production; the bloody physical violence is that of cartoons rather than Hitler. If there is aesthetic pleasure here, it is that of a syrupy nausea that repeats on you; so that the end of the world has some cleansing, bracing effect of sand and waste landscape, of the seashore.”
So, in attempting to perceive our present synoptically, we experience how the differences between disparate perspectives are related. The distinction between these social positions at first distorts and splinters any effort to see everything at once. They cannot be straightforwardly assembled like a jigsaw. Attempting to do so makes us aware that the pieces that we do have do not seamlessly fit together. And herein lies the truth of the operation: our cognizance of the gaps and frictions brings into sharp relief what is missing from the individual pieces. We come to understand that individual efforts to account for everything are limited by the extraordinary forces of our social world, which we recognize negatively in their effects, including, precisely, our very inability to see everything immediately. Jameson diagnoses this as a mismatch between existential experience and structural meaning.
Counterintuitively, it’s because of this obfuscation that following Jameson into the recesses of our material and imaginary world is not a fruitless task. Perhaps the organization and structure of the essay collection is appropriate after all, insofar as it is resonant with these dissonances. Adopting this view, the reader finds themselves in the position of the analyst, tracing the symptoms of history—an endeavor consistent with the Jamesonian argument cited above, whether he intended the organization of these essays to lead the reader down this alley or not.
The apparent fragmentary quality of the chapters may then be read as a response to the fact that a “totalized world is finally unavailable for perception,” and, like DeLillo, Jameson’s efforts “hold to the fragments of place, but […] mark those with a peculiar structural absence,” arranging “the camera in such a way as to underscore its own vacancy, the placelessness of this peculiar multinational […] subject as it wanders across such clusters of full space, clusters still vaguely warm from the evanescent presence of the sacred”— though the sacred must here be grasped as the momentary flashes of the present (of History in the grandest and most global sense) captured in Jameson’s writings.
In this way, Inventions of a Present may suggest at least a partial answer as to how to treat Jameson’s oeuvre, from his notoriously complicated dialectical sentences that attempt to grasp everything at once to the vast array of materials (literature, film, theory, politics—and everything else) that Jameson relates to our contemporary historical milieu. It is as much about his failures, the gaps and discontinuities, as his successes; these are symptomatic of the totality which his work attempts to grasp, the world system that eludes existential immediacy. In this effort resides the promise of failure.
Jameson’s efforts to account for our globalized world were of course imperfect, incomplete, necessarily partial; and that partiality comes to be instructive in itself, hinting how we might proceed with a reading of the gaps. Ultimately, the impossibility of an immediate existential comprehension of the world system is conditioned by the historical unfolding of our present—and it is our recognition of the historical nature of the present that is a precondition for our embracing the uncertainty of a different future. ♦