In Place of Change
Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms
Verso, 320pp, £20.00, ISBN 9781781685938
reviewed by John O'Meara Dunn
Modernism is the moment when resistance embodies revolution. This line can be towed more or less cleanly through Fredric Jameson’s The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms. This work bookends 2013’s The Antinomies of Realism and continues Jameson’s wider six-volume project, ‘The Poetics of Social Forms’ and that series’ exploration of the ways in which history and art inform each other’s inscription. Carried through from his last work is the concept of two temporalities of persistence and affect. These two states rest in the long shadow of Jameson’s ‘The End of Temporality’ (in his Antinomies of Realism, 2013) which describes the ‘shrinking of contemporary (bourgeois) experience such that we begin to live a perpetual present.’ When Jameson is at his best, reading The Ancients and the Postmoderns is to experience the deft touch of a corpus specialist balanced with the global speculation of the cultural theorist. For instance, in the opening sections, Thomas Mann sits briefly and happily alongside Umberto Eco to fuel the notion of Mahler’s ‘open work’ that is still in touch with the notion of an exhaustive totality ‘thereby keeping the possibility of the New alive,’ which is in Jameson’s worldview always also the collective concern of base resistance to the superstructures of historical determination.
Yet, it is sometimes hard to pin down this book’s nuances as a coherent thesis on that modern possibility of a novel temporal exchange rather than a plethora of essays on different cultural dialectics pushing in their own directions. The polymathic nature of Jameson’s work means there are bound to be obscurities and cultural barriers for all but the most well read of audiences, which always risks an asymmetrical workload in contextualising the object of each chapter’s study to the global and total dialectical project which will, inevitably, reveal itself as Jameson’s concern. This is when the work starts to look littered with indulgent digressions, no matter how historically and intertextually fluent these moments of virtuosity are. He is occasionally overbearingly au fait with works of such complexity that we risk embracing his critical idiom as a totality unto itself, just to stay in step with the author’s pace.
That said, the book’s conclusions fall under three recognisable and interconnected rubrics. The first of these charts a ‘Classical’ modernism with which Rubens, Wagner, and Mahler confront the chronology of history with an intensification of their work’s form and content that interact in ‘an eternally present’ event on canvas or stage, so as those categories become indistinguishable and conceptually modern. The first chapter’s conclusions echo throughout the book in lieu of an introduction. Jameson here makes the ‘outrageous assertion’ that Modernism begins ‘with the Council of Trent (ending in 1563) – in which case the Baroque becomes the first secular age’ (the reactionary council condemning all forms of impeaching Protestant heresy, so we are told). Modernism receives an historical overhaul in the same tone as the revisionist method of works such as Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010) that seeks Albrecht Dürer’s 16th century as the protomodernist worldview, rather than the 19th-century literary canon. The Baroque, a style as much as period, is useful for Jameson’s work too because in its social structures and cultural products it fills the space opened up in turning away from Church doctrine to a new kind of relation to the absolute made possible by ‘Luther’s revolution.’ A subjective experience of God, in this vision, is the first step towards His irrelevance.
A Baroque sensibility in the wake of this fundamental change is found in Rubens and Caravaggio in oils in the opening chapters – later Wagner and Mahler in symphonic and tonal sound – as the event of art becoming ‘the primary vehicle for truth and for a vision of the world’ rather than God, and this because ‘affect’ – that which is outside of parameters for meaning – has entered into art in modernism’s intervention into history. The project for modernism, then, is to voice in a new language of forms that which would otherwise be only felt as the haptic resonance of ‘the other.’
And with Jameson’s definition of ‘affect’ as a bodily state – something beyond the human bind of corporeality and consciousness but registered there – art’s affect is also the site of a freedom from the proscribed chronological continuity of textual ‘emotions.’ Christ as a body in motion is imagined in its ‘multiple pliancy’ in Rubens’ ‘Descent from the Cross,’ (for one example among the many cited) and Christ becomes no longer purely symbolic of a singular deity, for his crucifixion requires the visualisation of the many hands of collective labour to manipulate the weight, to bend the broken limbs, to clean the corpse, thus embarking on a new history of form found in the Baroque’s ‘aesthetic autonomy’ from the Biblical narrative before it. Imagining these possibilities is the first step to modernist narrative invention that collapses the difference between art’s figuration and the art viewer’s corporeal response to art, Jameson argues. The other side of this manipulation is a preoccupation with the limits and the death of the old forms of temporality which Jameson maintains a morbid fascination with throughout; this is the maligned ‘reduction to the body’ of human experience because of social and economic alienation. Theory as a modern praxis steps in to continue this manipulation of narrative structure and attempts to show how from this reduction, new freedoms can be described by modernism. However, a secularism of the absolute in art would see ‘an intersection of consciousness and body menaced by the twin external forces of bureaucratic technology and state power.’ However, Jameson is wary of the pitfalls of such an approach that is still tied to the religious order it breaks from. ‘The allegorical formula,’ required of a critical theory of modernism’s Baroque tendencies,
Jameson shows us that the violent dissolution of meaning is always just beyond the vivid affect art has already made before an allegorical or theoretical meaning arrives; stasis, or even boredom, is always just beyond the instrumental synthesis of an interpretation, and the work must resemble this collision, an event, to dispel that boredom. The ‘narrative body’ which registers this event allows us to think of two distinct logical temporalities, a before and after ‘the impact’ which intervenes in the chronological teleology of tradition and values, all of which must be reimagined thereafter.
A second section leaps forward (with a segue from ‘Mahler’s Movie music’) to shed light on neglected auteurs in European cinema and their innovations in figuring both the materiality of what we might call the embodied ‘camera in the world’ and cinema’s ‘adaptation of reality and of the human gaze to the peculiar ontological focus’ of that virtual eye. Here, Jameson’s ‘world modernism’ looks to be more of a ‘what could have been modernism,’ either from the former USSR (Alexander Sokurov), Poland (Krzysztof Kieślowski) or the revolutionary turbulent Greece (if only we hadn’t venerated tired idioms and lost sight of a revolutionary zeal of modernism). One example is Theo Angelopoulous, a figure Jameson wants to depict as a lost Greek Godard or Fellini, because his films offer ‘a privileged space in which to observe this dilemma of the alternation of the discourse of interpretation or meaning and that of technique or construction.’ Cinematic thinking finds its forebears in Deleuze, most obviously, but Jameson steers us into a kind of epic cinema that is peculiar to a Greek sensibility or even a ‘first philosophy,’ where the above ‘opposition is lifted’ and form and technique, subject and object, are all part of one question: the question of being.
Part three details the imposed temporal continuities of modernism that are subject to the postmodern bent for creative adaptation and reinterpretation of genre forms in film, novel and TV, in works like Robert Altman’s Shortcuts (1993), David Simon’s The Wire (2002-2008), and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). It seeks to place these within the broader structures of epistemological and narratological realism. His conclusion on adaptation in film narratives is succinct:
These last archetypal generic and formal concerns – with which we linger longest at five chapters – are familiar to a more epochal modernism’s beguiling demand to reinvent the cognitive model of that ‘irresistible force and the unmoveable obstacle’ of reality and make that change stick, a desire as true in Jameson’s mind to Wagner’s Siegfried as it was to Ezra Pound: ‘Kinder, macht Neues! Children, invent, think of something new, make it new!’ Reprisals of each section intertwine as the book starts to speak to itself, so that we must revisit Wagner at great length where his oeuvre has been adapted to offer new solutions to the same unsolved paradox of ‘form problems’ (a concept from Lukács which guides Jameson throughout the book). For example, Wagner is depicted as never being able to resolve the tensions between theatrical and musical modalities, to his discredit. But this same tension is revisited and heightened in the manner of indirect adaption described above in Danish director Kasper Bech Holten’s rendition of Tannhäuser to his great success (see chapter 7: ‘Eurotrash or Regieoper?’). Postmodernism, we surmise here, allows not for an arch irony of generic pastiche, but for the collaborative and visionary endeavour of elaborate staging (acrobatics, trapeze and extreme textual revisions feature heavily in Holten’s production) of a classic work to devalue the notion of ‘pure form,’ which Wagner was forced to make concessions to in the uncertainty of a new modern dialogue between music and drama. The point of this kind of postmodernism, Jameson says, ‘is to break the work down into pieces of meaning and translate each of them into letters, like a rebus, whose collection of signs then unfolds before us.’ This reading attempts to break the lens of postmodern anti-intellectualism that paradigmatically venerates the ‘triumph of postmodern and mass-cultural tastelessness.’
Jameson also gets the chance to settle the score on a remorseful footnote from his 1991 opus, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: ‘This is the place to regret the absence from this book of a chapter on cyberpunk, henceforth, for many of us, the supreme, literary expression if not of Postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself.’ When the schizoid non-future starts to look more like an eternal return of something more historically meaningful, it is when William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer is here imagined as embodying precisely not a model for ‘late capitalism itself,’ but the zenith of a literary genre that manipulates ‘a sense of our individual relationships to realities that transcend our phenomenological mapping of systems and our cognitive abilities to think them.’ Postmodernism depicted temporality as a question of the spatial arrest of pseudo-cyber-capital, that the postmodern was unable to overcome for want of an answer to late capitalism’s spatial alienation: ‘The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.’
Now, the story-world of cyberspace does some of that work by being the idealist fantasy space of Neuromancer, where characters plug into a different technologically and physically liberated digital spaces, they are able to navigate without the phenomenological constraints of the world they leave behind. The focus here is on the moment that narrative envisions a totality in complete difference to the global state of things and on what it has to overcome to become: ‘The philosophical meaning of plot construction has to start from what stands in the way of constructing a plot or story,’ and this could be the same maligned real-world political or phenomenological absentia in the face of a capitalist horizon as before, or it could be the more computable infrastructure of narrative-making through which we think despite this horizon.
Indeed, cyberpunk’s global affect as ‘thirty years a classic,’ is not against the numerical weightlessness of capital as such and financial speculation, which has taken us into a global abstraction of labour, but rather the conceptual structures which underpin any such speculation, when embraced for their abstraction and manipulated with narrative, enable a new reading within a ‘second order of abstraction.’ Narrative’s uncanny affinity to engender idealist cognitive contortions of the real in the moment of reading, all the while the reader stays put, delivers an affect of a kind of spatial transcendence, especially the cinematic illusions the reader visits in Gibson’s cyberspace. ‘I merely want to remind us,’ Jameson writes now, ‘that cyberspace is a literary invention and does not really exist, however much time we spend on the computer every day.’ And with this we get a sense of the real critical motives of this book. The Marxist global totality is as Jameson acknowledges elsewhere (in an essay the London Review of Books entitled ‘First Impressions’) an economic model for a dialectic repositioning of a system as such, not a political one but the materialist and conceptual. The economy that postmodernism intervenes in is primarily the economy of narrative meaning between writer and reader, so that, Jameson says, ‘[the new postmodern abstraction is the abstraction of information as such,’ so that those familiar monikers of writer and reader, or those of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’ in the second order of abstraction, no longer have a hold on a given role. This enables formal concerns of the postmodern novel to circumvent the limitations of thinking of it in a historical continuity, meanwhile acknowledging the presuppositions and social materials which begat it.
Thus, projected into the urban dystopia of Baltimore in The Wire, where capital controls everything (Lester Freaman: ‘start to follow the money, and you don’t know where the fuck it’s gonna take you’) is a kind of resistance to capital which a novelistic realism can offer the TV series. Jameson argues The Wire stages a dialectic tension between utopian models of collective change and the totality of the status quo. This arrives in the structural reformation of the crime/cop melodrama, and also the attempts to break the cycle of drug crime with new uses for previously tarnished space, such as series three’s reformed (or merely broken) soldier Cutty’s planned boxing ring for street kids, or else the police turning a blind eye to the trade in ‘Hamsterdam’; a literal blind alley where narcotics laws are not enforced and therefore provoke neither murder nor the wrath of the incumbent mayor, whose only concern is the re-election a falling murder rate will guarantee. The Wire’s project seems to be both a timeless elegiac realism for place and status set within that place based on sheer materiality. That the superstructural system of genre or of the social hegemony often reclaims these spaces from the idealist (the dope, the bodies and the rent keep piling up) doesn’t alter the new model postmodernist fiction envisions in order to combat modernity’s nuanced ways of dehumanising existence, Jameson reads this not as a direct realism, but a heightened timeless possibility of utopianism that the likes of a realist novel pits against the unmoveable real it is drawn to. The Marxist critic of course must find a workable truth from these kind of tensions that does not cancel out the dialectic, but leaves it in place as a mark of the historical nature of formal expression.
Of interest to the patient reader is Jameson’s ranging connectivity between discursive cultures throughout The Ancients and the Postmoderns as a whole, because it is in the grit of the critical material that we find the strongest argument. Jameson argues that the modernist artwork, from Rubens to Raymond Carver, must embrace the eternal present of affects, because this is how they inhabit the full force of the event they must become.
Yet, it is sometimes hard to pin down this book’s nuances as a coherent thesis on that modern possibility of a novel temporal exchange rather than a plethora of essays on different cultural dialectics pushing in their own directions. The polymathic nature of Jameson’s work means there are bound to be obscurities and cultural barriers for all but the most well read of audiences, which always risks an asymmetrical workload in contextualising the object of each chapter’s study to the global and total dialectical project which will, inevitably, reveal itself as Jameson’s concern. This is when the work starts to look littered with indulgent digressions, no matter how historically and intertextually fluent these moments of virtuosity are. He is occasionally overbearingly au fait with works of such complexity that we risk embracing his critical idiom as a totality unto itself, just to stay in step with the author’s pace.
That said, the book’s conclusions fall under three recognisable and interconnected rubrics. The first of these charts a ‘Classical’ modernism with which Rubens, Wagner, and Mahler confront the chronology of history with an intensification of their work’s form and content that interact in ‘an eternally present’ event on canvas or stage, so as those categories become indistinguishable and conceptually modern. The first chapter’s conclusions echo throughout the book in lieu of an introduction. Jameson here makes the ‘outrageous assertion’ that Modernism begins ‘with the Council of Trent (ending in 1563) – in which case the Baroque becomes the first secular age’ (the reactionary council condemning all forms of impeaching Protestant heresy, so we are told). Modernism receives an historical overhaul in the same tone as the revisionist method of works such as Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010) that seeks Albrecht Dürer’s 16th century as the protomodernist worldview, rather than the 19th-century literary canon. The Baroque, a style as much as period, is useful for Jameson’s work too because in its social structures and cultural products it fills the space opened up in turning away from Church doctrine to a new kind of relation to the absolute made possible by ‘Luther’s revolution.’ A subjective experience of God, in this vision, is the first step towards His irrelevance.
A Baroque sensibility in the wake of this fundamental change is found in Rubens and Caravaggio in oils in the opening chapters – later Wagner and Mahler in symphonic and tonal sound – as the event of art becoming ‘the primary vehicle for truth and for a vision of the world’ rather than God, and this because ‘affect’ – that which is outside of parameters for meaning – has entered into art in modernism’s intervention into history. The project for modernism, then, is to voice in a new language of forms that which would otherwise be only felt as the haptic resonance of ‘the other.’
And with Jameson’s definition of ‘affect’ as a bodily state – something beyond the human bind of corporeality and consciousness but registered there – art’s affect is also the site of a freedom from the proscribed chronological continuity of textual ‘emotions.’ Christ as a body in motion is imagined in its ‘multiple pliancy’ in Rubens’ ‘Descent from the Cross,’ (for one example among the many cited) and Christ becomes no longer purely symbolic of a singular deity, for his crucifixion requires the visualisation of the many hands of collective labour to manipulate the weight, to bend the broken limbs, to clean the corpse, thus embarking on a new history of form found in the Baroque’s ‘aesthetic autonomy’ from the Biblical narrative before it. Imagining these possibilities is the first step to modernist narrative invention that collapses the difference between art’s figuration and the art viewer’s corporeal response to art, Jameson argues. The other side of this manipulation is a preoccupation with the limits and the death of the old forms of temporality which Jameson maintains a morbid fascination with throughout; this is the maligned ‘reduction to the body’ of human experience because of social and economic alienation. Theory as a modern praxis steps in to continue this manipulation of narrative structure and attempts to show how from this reduction, new freedoms can be described by modernism. However, a secularism of the absolute in art would see ‘an intersection of consciousness and body menaced by the twin external forces of bureaucratic technology and state power.’ However, Jameson is wary of the pitfalls of such an approach that is still tied to the religious order it breaks from. ‘The allegorical formula,’ required of a critical theory of modernism’s Baroque tendencies,
would only be useful if it helps us transform our visual contemplation of this image into an encounter of two dimensions of being which has all the impact of a physical collision and all the intensity of an event.
Jameson shows us that the violent dissolution of meaning is always just beyond the vivid affect art has already made before an allegorical or theoretical meaning arrives; stasis, or even boredom, is always just beyond the instrumental synthesis of an interpretation, and the work must resemble this collision, an event, to dispel that boredom. The ‘narrative body’ which registers this event allows us to think of two distinct logical temporalities, a before and after ‘the impact’ which intervenes in the chronological teleology of tradition and values, all of which must be reimagined thereafter.
A second section leaps forward (with a segue from ‘Mahler’s Movie music’) to shed light on neglected auteurs in European cinema and their innovations in figuring both the materiality of what we might call the embodied ‘camera in the world’ and cinema’s ‘adaptation of reality and of the human gaze to the peculiar ontological focus’ of that virtual eye. Here, Jameson’s ‘world modernism’ looks to be more of a ‘what could have been modernism,’ either from the former USSR (Alexander Sokurov), Poland (Krzysztof Kieślowski) or the revolutionary turbulent Greece (if only we hadn’t venerated tired idioms and lost sight of a revolutionary zeal of modernism). One example is Theo Angelopoulous, a figure Jameson wants to depict as a lost Greek Godard or Fellini, because his films offer ‘a privileged space in which to observe this dilemma of the alternation of the discourse of interpretation or meaning and that of technique or construction.’ Cinematic thinking finds its forebears in Deleuze, most obviously, but Jameson steers us into a kind of epic cinema that is peculiar to a Greek sensibility or even a ‘first philosophy,’ where the above ‘opposition is lifted’ and form and technique, subject and object, are all part of one question: the question of being.
Part three details the imposed temporal continuities of modernism that are subject to the postmodern bent for creative adaptation and reinterpretation of genre forms in film, novel and TV, in works like Robert Altman’s Shortcuts (1993), David Simon’s The Wire (2002-2008), and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). It seeks to place these within the broader structures of epistemological and narratological realism. His conclusion on adaptation in film narratives is succinct:
it can only work if the two artefacts are radically different in their spirit and in the truth they convey; if each one speaks for itself and in effect is no longer a replica of the other, so that in a sense the very meaning of the term adaption is completely undermined.
These last archetypal generic and formal concerns – with which we linger longest at five chapters – are familiar to a more epochal modernism’s beguiling demand to reinvent the cognitive model of that ‘irresistible force and the unmoveable obstacle’ of reality and make that change stick, a desire as true in Jameson’s mind to Wagner’s Siegfried as it was to Ezra Pound: ‘Kinder, macht Neues! Children, invent, think of something new, make it new!’ Reprisals of each section intertwine as the book starts to speak to itself, so that we must revisit Wagner at great length where his oeuvre has been adapted to offer new solutions to the same unsolved paradox of ‘form problems’ (a concept from Lukács which guides Jameson throughout the book). For example, Wagner is depicted as never being able to resolve the tensions between theatrical and musical modalities, to his discredit. But this same tension is revisited and heightened in the manner of indirect adaption described above in Danish director Kasper Bech Holten’s rendition of Tannhäuser to his great success (see chapter 7: ‘Eurotrash or Regieoper?’). Postmodernism, we surmise here, allows not for an arch irony of generic pastiche, but for the collaborative and visionary endeavour of elaborate staging (acrobatics, trapeze and extreme textual revisions feature heavily in Holten’s production) of a classic work to devalue the notion of ‘pure form,’ which Wagner was forced to make concessions to in the uncertainty of a new modern dialogue between music and drama. The point of this kind of postmodernism, Jameson says, ‘is to break the work down into pieces of meaning and translate each of them into letters, like a rebus, whose collection of signs then unfolds before us.’ This reading attempts to break the lens of postmodern anti-intellectualism that paradigmatically venerates the ‘triumph of postmodern and mass-cultural tastelessness.’
Jameson also gets the chance to settle the score on a remorseful footnote from his 1991 opus, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: ‘This is the place to regret the absence from this book of a chapter on cyberpunk, henceforth, for many of us, the supreme, literary expression if not of Postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself.’ When the schizoid non-future starts to look more like an eternal return of something more historically meaningful, it is when William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer is here imagined as embodying precisely not a model for ‘late capitalism itself,’ but the zenith of a literary genre that manipulates ‘a sense of our individual relationships to realities that transcend our phenomenological mapping of systems and our cognitive abilities to think them.’ Postmodernism depicted temporality as a question of the spatial arrest of pseudo-cyber-capital, that the postmodern was unable to overcome for want of an answer to late capitalism’s spatial alienation: ‘The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.’
Now, the story-world of cyberspace does some of that work by being the idealist fantasy space of Neuromancer, where characters plug into a different technologically and physically liberated digital spaces, they are able to navigate without the phenomenological constraints of the world they leave behind. The focus here is on the moment that narrative envisions a totality in complete difference to the global state of things and on what it has to overcome to become: ‘The philosophical meaning of plot construction has to start from what stands in the way of constructing a plot or story,’ and this could be the same maligned real-world political or phenomenological absentia in the face of a capitalist horizon as before, or it could be the more computable infrastructure of narrative-making through which we think despite this horizon.
Indeed, cyberpunk’s global affect as ‘thirty years a classic,’ is not against the numerical weightlessness of capital as such and financial speculation, which has taken us into a global abstraction of labour, but rather the conceptual structures which underpin any such speculation, when embraced for their abstraction and manipulated with narrative, enable a new reading within a ‘second order of abstraction.’ Narrative’s uncanny affinity to engender idealist cognitive contortions of the real in the moment of reading, all the while the reader stays put, delivers an affect of a kind of spatial transcendence, especially the cinematic illusions the reader visits in Gibson’s cyberspace. ‘I merely want to remind us,’ Jameson writes now, ‘that cyberspace is a literary invention and does not really exist, however much time we spend on the computer every day.’ And with this we get a sense of the real critical motives of this book. The Marxist global totality is as Jameson acknowledges elsewhere (in an essay the London Review of Books entitled ‘First Impressions’) an economic model for a dialectic repositioning of a system as such, not a political one but the materialist and conceptual. The economy that postmodernism intervenes in is primarily the economy of narrative meaning between writer and reader, so that, Jameson says, ‘[the new postmodern abstraction is the abstraction of information as such,’ so that those familiar monikers of writer and reader, or those of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’ in the second order of abstraction, no longer have a hold on a given role. This enables formal concerns of the postmodern novel to circumvent the limitations of thinking of it in a historical continuity, meanwhile acknowledging the presuppositions and social materials which begat it.
Thus, projected into the urban dystopia of Baltimore in The Wire, where capital controls everything (Lester Freaman: ‘start to follow the money, and you don’t know where the fuck it’s gonna take you’) is a kind of resistance to capital which a novelistic realism can offer the TV series. Jameson argues The Wire stages a dialectic tension between utopian models of collective change and the totality of the status quo. This arrives in the structural reformation of the crime/cop melodrama, and also the attempts to break the cycle of drug crime with new uses for previously tarnished space, such as series three’s reformed (or merely broken) soldier Cutty’s planned boxing ring for street kids, or else the police turning a blind eye to the trade in ‘Hamsterdam’; a literal blind alley where narcotics laws are not enforced and therefore provoke neither murder nor the wrath of the incumbent mayor, whose only concern is the re-election a falling murder rate will guarantee. The Wire’s project seems to be both a timeless elegiac realism for place and status set within that place based on sheer materiality. That the superstructural system of genre or of the social hegemony often reclaims these spaces from the idealist (the dope, the bodies and the rent keep piling up) doesn’t alter the new model postmodernist fiction envisions in order to combat modernity’s nuanced ways of dehumanising existence, Jameson reads this not as a direct realism, but a heightened timeless possibility of utopianism that the likes of a realist novel pits against the unmoveable real it is drawn to. The Marxist critic of course must find a workable truth from these kind of tensions that does not cancel out the dialectic, but leaves it in place as a mark of the historical nature of formal expression.
Of interest to the patient reader is Jameson’s ranging connectivity between discursive cultures throughout The Ancients and the Postmoderns as a whole, because it is in the grit of the critical material that we find the strongest argument. Jameson argues that the modernist artwork, from Rubens to Raymond Carver, must embrace the eternal present of affects, because this is how they inhabit the full force of the event they must become.