Fredric Jameson

Thank you. and thank you for joining us on another episode of why theory as always i am your host ryan angley joined as always by co-host todd mcgowan and todd Normally I would say, how you doing, buddy? Today we are grieving and remembering the loss of an absolutely major figure in our field. Many of you probably know. Maybe even most. Frederick Jameson passed away last week. Yeah, last exactly seven. Yeah, so we're recording this on a Saturday and he passed away last Saturday. And just...

We're going to take the time in this episode, interrupting our normally scheduled or our previously scheduled horror episode, to just talk about a figure that means a lot to both of us. and go over some of the things that have left a mark on us. There will also be some qualified disagreement from Todd McGowan. Pure encomium from Ryan. Yeah, I think so. We'll see as the episode goes on. Again, out of love and appreciation for just like...

An unbelievable life's work. Here's where I want to put this in. Can I just say something? Go ahead, yeah. Because I think it's like we're in the, you're reading Heart of Darkness, and it's like the horror, and then... It stops because people were waiting for the next, the horror, and they're not going to get it for another.

episode so so it's a bit of a it's a bit of a we're making it to be continued where yeah it was uh where there was not one a slight interruption so um so here here's where we'll start and i'll kick this to you if you want to take this i think one of the things is so striking about Jameson's career and his work is that when you start talking about the major ideas and the things that he was able to bring to the theoretical table, you...

And I, like, we're going to explain them. And there may be people out there who will hear it and be like, oh, so what? And it's like, it's in that he articulated things. I mean, starting with maybe even... But from the political unconscious, the idea of a work of literature or... or a literary work arising in a particular form due to political friction at the time, the era and epoch in which it arose.

I think people just think that now. We should be so lucky to have articulated something in our lives that later becomes common sense. And I don't know that I could pay a greater compliment to... to Jameson or a greater observation of his intervention and his life's work than to put it like that. Totally agree. Totally agree. I think he...

So he was a major figure. He was up until his death at age 90, right? Like a major theoretical figure. But when I was in graduate school, he was the figure, I think, probably. And I... In fact, the first class I took as a PhD student was a seminar just on Frederick Jameson. Unfortunately, it was a terrible seminar because the...

The professor believed that the students should run everything, including creating the syllabus, which we didn't know anything about Jameson. So we didn't know how to create a syllabus on Jameson. So that was not a great idea. That is a vision of the flipped classroom that is absolutely getting away with something. To me, that turned me off. I never, from that moment on, I've never even allowed a student presentation in one of my classes.

Because I was so pissed. And I thought, you've just ruined an entire class where I could have learned more about Jameson, although I did learn a lot just on my own. And reading, the other thing I felt in that class was how stupid I was compared to these other, I remember a couple of women, they're like, Walter Benjamin. I'm like, who the hell is that? So like, I was really, I mean, I was like a real. Tyro. But Jameson really, I really found him such a...

powerful source. And we read, this was right after the postmodernism book came out. So we read Political Unconscious and the postmodernism book. And we read this earlier book by him, Marxism in Form, which I think is under talked about and really great too. And there's a last chapter.

in that book called Towards Dialectical Criticism, which has some really nice, interesting examples of how he conceives of dialectics, which is not exactly how we conceive it, but what it does is it thinks dialectics as the totality of relations, which is really, I think it's important, and I think there's definitely value in that chapter, and it does as good a job as any I've read about.

uh, thinking about dialectics and Marxist terms of Marxist aesthetics. So I'll just say that about that. Uh, anyway, so I was, I was the other little story that I was, I was in that class and then About a year or two later, Jameson comes to Ohio State to speak. I saw him speak twice. I've never met him. And he came to Ohio State to speak. Huge crowd, like probably 500, 600 people.

Watching him and Hillary happened to be visiting me at Ohio State and my professor, Walter Mac Davis, went to the talk with Hillary. And me, and so we, for some reason, Paul was sitting somewhere else or something. So I was sitting down and I had...

Mac on one side, Hillary on the other side, and we're listening to Jameson. It's like, if there's a heaven, that would be something that would happen in it. And then, so he's talking. It's very good talk, I thought. And I looked down, but I don't know. 30 minutes into the talk and each of them had their heads sound asleep, rested on one of my shoulders. I thought that was, I thought even this is kind of, there's something.

beatific about this moment right like they they found it kind of his voice sort of soothing and they were tired and fell asleep and afterwards I said well you guys missed a great talk they were like both what do you mean it was great I'm like yeah okay so those are my that's my Jameson stories I didn't know either of that. That's really sweet, actually. We'll start this way, just in the strictly...

This was how he came into my theoretical understanding. I had read Political Unconscious. I don't know if I read it with... With you or not? I don't think you did, no. Okay, so this had been later. And then I read Postmodernism. And those were in like a... They get taught in intro theory courses.

literary and cultural theory courses in a PhD program because they're just foundational. Again, just going back to this thing. I think we read excerpts from Prison House of Language. It's one of those things where... He's one of those figures where it's incredible that that was all from him. The ideas. You're like, oh no, that's also Jameson. No, no, that's Jameson too. It's like a Mark Twain or a Shakespeare quote. Incredible breath. Incredible breath.

Unbelievable. Something I want to talk about later for just strictly personal reasons. The thing that... has meant the most to me is actually the foreword that he wrote to the new edition of Sartre's critique of dialectical reason because I read I think a copy you gave to me like it was an older edition of Critique of Dialectical Reason. And I just, I knew...

I knew why you gave it to me. I knew why I should read it because of what he says about the series and I was beginning my journey into writing about seriality and obviously I had to know Sartre. I understood I understood the queue of people, a series of people organized by capital. I kind of got that, but the whole book, I didn't... I was just kind of mystified. I really didn't know where I was. And I felt that I didn't...

I probably, this is true, I didn't know enough to make sense of it, otherwise it would have made sense. And then, I don't know, it was a year or two later, there was just luckily enough, or I just found out about it, I'm not sure which way this went, but there was a sale on...

Verso, and I saw that there had a new edition of Critique of Dialectual Reason, and it had a forward by Frederick Jameson that is significant, I want to say. And I read it, and it was for the first time, the book, it snapped. It snapped into sense for me. That's how I think of him. I find that there is just tremendous rigor and clarity in his work and in his writing. Like...

We did those episodes a couple years ago on Critique of Dialectical Reason. There's no way that book means anything to me without the Jameson foreword. I want to say that I mentioned that, but I maybe didn't.

hit that hard enough at the time because it's just very very true like it's just that that forward it sounds stupid because it's not like a full book that he wrote but I mean like the people There are some things like this, like introductions and forwards that unlock a work for a large group of people.

And they're largely, these are like the more thankless level of philosophical tasks that you can do. It's to write a forward, to write an introduction. Yeah, for sure. And it's just like, yeah, that's what I'll... what i'll just i'll say about that it's just like a a complete uh door opening moment and i just i don't know and i and i that's that that's how i'm gonna remember him i think yeah i yeah i i that's that's great i mean i think for

So I think for a lot of people, the first text that they encountered was Political Unconscious. So it's 1981. It's published. And so he had already kind of – he's written his first dissertation, his first book, Ron Sartre. You mentioned made him an appropriate figure to write that. forward. And then he wrote Marxism in Form, which is important. He wrote Prison House of Language. He had some, he was writing, he's very prolific. He wrote almost, sometimes almost a book a year or even

And then in 81, I think the big breakthrough was political unconscious. And one of the things that I think it does and— This is something that's there even in as early as Marxism in form, which is early 70s. What he does is he brings together structuralist analysis and... historicism right and or to put it in his terms like synchronic analysis and diachronic analysis right like so he's he takes in prison house of language for instance he takes saussure

And Russian formalist thinkers, so structuralism, he takes it seriously. It's a critique of that. But he takes it seriously as a form of analysis and then tries to add. a dialectical approach to history into that structural analysis. So I think that the acme of this approach is political unconscious because, so the book starts with this.

phrase that I think is probably the most quoted thing by Jameson, right? It says the first two words of the book is one sentence. Always historicized with the exclamation point. And I think people take from that this idea that, okay, Jameson is the... historicist par excellence right like he's the one he's the one who's i mean he's given us the imperative he's in a way he's he's leading

the charge of what would become New Historicism. This is before New Historicism. So you could say that, right? Even though Marxism and New Historicism are totally at odds with each other. But... What I think is interesting about the book, right, is that it's really invested in a structural analysis as well, right? He has these...

This guy, A.J. Gramos, they made these rectangles that are used to structurally analyze different things. So the book is filled with these Gramosian... rectangles, and then he'll map out the novels that he's analyzing in terms of this, like I'll put different characters and different points on the rectangle and has arrows going in every which way. And at the time I like really worked to make sense of that. And I, so I think it's valuable.

And I even wrote a – I'll never forget this. I even wrote it for that class, that Jameson class. I wrote a paper on Sister Carrie in which I created my own Negrimazian. I have like, Hurstwood, Carrie, whatever, which is terrible. And I like – I think I – I mean, my God, this is so embarrassing. I sent it to a journal and they're like, please never send us anything ever again. I'm like, okay, I got the message. They're like, this is kind of a... some kind of parody of Frederick Jameson.

But I think it's not an exaggeration. You should have sent it to your parents to have it put on the fridge at home. Well, actually, that essay does exist. It was before. like discs even like I but I didn't have it on a computer and I but I have a printout I don't have a computer file anymore but I have a printout of the essay so just I save I save things that

I don't save anything that's like a prize or reward or anything, but I save humiliating things. That's a nice humiliation. Like all the rejections I've ever got, I've saved, but the acceptances are. lost to history. Who cares? So, but I think it's, isn't what's so great about that book is that it's not just, oh, it's historicized. It's historicized with the structural analysis that allows us to make sense of the novel in a, in a synchronic, that is like a temporal way, but then.

that's the effect of history, right? Isn't that what's so great about him? He shows how this synchronic atemporal moment is itself. the effect of history. So I found that to be such a valuable thing in that book. And I really, I mean, I... I think political unconscious is probably still, I don't know what people think, but to me is still probably the masterpiece, right? It's such a, it really kind of gets this idea that the other, that.

Again, like you're saying, now what I just said may even seem commonsensical. Of course, that's true, but it's only because of him that it would ever seem that way. Yeah, just the basics of the literature PhD. were in some ways written by Jameson's work. I just want to underline something you said very quickly. Jameson being seen as an historicist par excellence, that misses...

Just to give a very quick example, because we're talking about this and we're not talking about historicism exactly in this episode by itself, but there was this, I think the best place to see how Marxism and new historicism... were historically at odds with each other, are in the, I think in the pages of representations, that journal, and there was this movement. I want to say Stephen Greenblatt was a pretty big figure in this. For sure. He's the figure. So it was this movement away from...

ideology critique, which is Marxist, toward discourse analysis. That's kind of the big bedrock of new historicism. laying out. I just want people to hear it if they don't have that. Things that happen in academic journals are not necessarily things that everybody is going to have heard about who listens to our podcast. Probably no one should ever read an academic journal. Probably. That's its own episode, right? Because we need it, but then they're not accessible.

I was excited that the sports essay that I wrote for Psychoanalysis Culture and Society is free to access, but it's only because Pomona College pays for that to be publicly accessible. which is my favorite thing that is in print currently that I've written, that's not accessible to everybody. That's a bummer. Just back more on point. So this movement from ideology critique toward discourse analysis, Jameson refuses...

For sure. And this is what you're trying to underline, is that he's able to put the... Even the Russian formalism, which at the time, they're more out of fashion now than they were when he wrote that. Yeah, they were out of fashion then, but you're right, even more so now. Even more so now. Maybe it's because of him. I don't even think about this. It's probably because of him that I still...

When I do the structure of a TV episode, I often refer back to the Russian formalism, and I just think it's... very helpful as a way to move through things. And I don't know, Jameson revitalizes that, I think, or shows what can be still done. As he's critiquing it, isn't that what's interesting? Yeah. I think that that's so valuable about him, right? Like even the things like he, there's things in.

Political unconscious obviously begins with this all as historicize. It's a critique of the prevailing structuralist. aftermath of structuralism's dominance, right? But at the same time, you're like, well, wait a minute, he's kind of shown...

the value of structuralism as a mode of analysis. So I think that's a, it's a pretty remark, like, it's like, you know that you know this reversal of the thing with enemies like that who needs friends right right right right you can't like he's a good enemy to have because he his depiction of your thing ends up or he appropriates the thing that he's critiquing in such a positive way that it ends up showing your thing in the best light possible. Like Russian formalism.

Its best champion is Frederick Jameson, who is its critic, right? I just think that there's something really just generous about that, I think. And I know that he was personally, for a lot of people...

a really generous thinker up to the very end, right? Like he was taking on dissertation students up until he was 90. So there's something really remarkably... generous about that and i think that is that comes through in his in his in his writing in his work this is this is a total this is an aside uh point but it is very hard to be...

so productive with one's work and also that active as a dissertation advisor. That's a total inside academia kind of thing. It really is true, Ryan. It's why I would never take a job where I had to direct dissertations. Right. Like, I mean, there's a certain advantage of being a little podunk state school. Right. Like I think. And yeah, I think there's some I think there's real truth to that. And he he was able to do both things. Yeah, which is hard. It's hard. You can't compare...

Obviously, the most productive person in our intellectual universe right now is Slavoj Zizek. But you can't – there's just no comparison because Slavoj has zero students, right? And so – and Jameson had – There's hundreds of, like, he really, I mean, that's another thing that's great about him is he proliferated theory out, because of his students, out to all these different universities all across the country.

There's sort of this meld of Marxism and psychoanalysis and Hegel in all these different places in a way that other people who don't have... PhD students like you and me, we don't have that kind of influence. But I think you're right. That really bespeaks his incredible productivity. He didn't confine the generosity to just his students, but also it's in his books as well.

Oh, absolutely. He was the Johnny Appleseed of the Unholy Alliance. He really was. He really was. You know? Yeah. He really was. So I'm going to – okay, you said this was coming. So here's – No, but listen. Hold on. I want to just – listen. You're – I just want to be clear. I just want to be clear. Because I think that this is I think this is nice of you. You want to do a regular episode in remembrance of him. And so I just want...

I just want to put that out there. In a regular episode, if we were covering Jameson, or any of these works in particular, we do the thing that we normally do. We do a portion of time, pretty much 20 minutes of a kind of summary What did the thing mean in the time that it was received? What's kind of like an orthodox?

which does not mean wrong, but orthodox way of understanding the thing. And then we're going to pick and pull at some tension points and try to make the thing move in a different direction and mobilize it to maybe get something new. out of what perhaps people would think to be a dry well. Something's been settled on this. I'm going to lodge another. I don't think it's respectful of people not to speak ill of the dead and not to criticize the dead. So I gave –

I've told this before. I gave the funeral oration for my father. It was a good half of it was a critique. And I hope when I'm dead, if anyone even... says my name, that most of it's a critique because that's the only way to really respect the person, I think. I mean, as you know, when you hand your thing to someone and they hand it back and they're like, great, this is so great.

I don't know. You're like, well, that's not very nice. It's not respecting me. So I feel the same way about this. But here's the thing. So Jameson was a scholar of Sartre. He met Sartre, which is cool. But I think that he had trouble integrating the insights of existentialism into his Marxism. And I want to...

Turn to, and I think the new edition doesn't have the same pagination, but I'm going to tell you the pagination. This is in chapter 5, page 261 of The Political Unconscious. And he's talking about the relationship between... Marxism and existentialism, and you'll see that his gloss on what existentialism is is pretty crude, but that's not even the point here. So he says that life is meaningless is not a proposition that need be inconsistent with Marxism.

whose affirmation is the quite different one that history is meaningful, however absurd organic life may happen to be. The real issue is not the propositions of existentialism.

but rather their charge of affect. In future societies, people will still grow old and die, but the Pascalian wager of Marxism lies elsewhere, namely in the idea... that death in a fragmented and individualized society is far more frightening and anxiety-laden than in a genuine community in which dying is something that happens to the group more intensely than it happens to the individual subject.

Okay. I'll just continue one little bit. The hypothesis is that time will be no less structurally empty, or to use a current version, presence will be no less of a structural and ontological illusion in a future communal social life, but rather that this particular fundamental revelation of the nothingness of existence will have lost its sharp and sharpness and pain, and be of less consequence. Okay, so, we, in the future,

which let's just get that word on the table because that's going to come up a lot in the next half hour or so. Death will be experienced more collectively and so it will be less painful. Now, couldn't you say exactly the opposite, right? Like life is pretty good, right? Like things are pretty good. It's not individualized and fragmented. We live in this community. Things are nice. It's a community. And so what's the worst thing that could happen? You die.

Couldn't you say that one of the things that's kind of nice about capitalism is it sucks so bad that when death comes along, you're like, oh, okay, fine. It's taken me away from this. Right? I mean, couldn't you just reverse it? Plus, I mean, this idea that the thesis of existentialism is life is meaningless. That's absurd. I mean, I don't know how he even wrote that. So, I don't know. So, I feel like that...

That totally misses. And the other thing I would say is even the collective dies, right? Like even the collective dies. Eventually. Like eventually the sun's going to go Nova, the universe is going to heat death, right? So there's like this kind of idea that in this socialist utopia, all of a sudden things are... Like the traumas of existence are mitigated. I just think, to me, it's the opposite. Like the world that I'm working toward.

I hope, in my whatever way, is a world in which, no, the traumas of existence are actually worse, right? Because for one thing, it's the avoidance of those traumas of existence that causes the oppressive society in the first place. And if you don't see that, I think you've missed something absolutely fundamental. Okay. So the wider point here. You're not going to refute me, okay. No, no, well, I'm just going to go, because your thing is about Jameson Utopia.

I will just say this, and I'll try to engage on the specifics of what you just said. One of the things that I appreciate a lot about Jameson is he tried to... he dedicated a lot of time to trying to think just the biggest things that we can think. And I do think, I'm not sure there's a bigger thing that you can try to think. than the actual nuts and bolts of how something like that would work and how it could work. This is one of the things I wanted to get to later. He has this...

This little essay, I think you can access it on Verso on Walmart as Utopia. I almost think it was this essay that convinced them to make sure that everyone knows in print not to write wall-mart. When I was working there, they were Wall-Mart and then they were not because organizationally it was determined that that seemed too corporate and they wanted to seem more friendly. without the dash is more friendly. That's what they decided. But he writes it wall dash mart, which he should do that.

So I'll just talk about that later. Obviously, as people know, I worked at Walmart for five years. And there is something utopic that I want to underline about it. It's not what he writes about, but there is something that I want to get at because I like the way that he thinks it. So just as a wider thing, I'm with you on this point. I do think that if we want, moving toward...

To move toward a utopic vision, I do think that trauma has to be laid bare and not in any way that would make it less evident.

It's hard to avoid the word that utopia would repress trauma. Isn't that a problem with the word utopia? That would be my argument. Yeah. I think to me, that's the... underlying and i think that's where jameson comes up against his limitation and it's a very you know he's one of the great things about him is the way that he integrates psychoanalysis into his marxism right like he's a real

He's a real serious psychoanalytic thinker. Absolutely true, right? But, sorry, psychoanalysis is an anti-utopian. Like, you can't make reference to utopia. You just, you can't do it because, I mean, isn't the fundamental thesis of civilization's discontents that there's a basic antagonism between every individual and every? collective, and that it's insurmountable. And so what we can do is navigate that and navigate it better than we are now and create a kind of egalitarian society, which I...

obviously totally for. But I don't think we can create a utopia. And I think this, I think the idea... I mentioned Mac. Would he say, sorry, if he was able to respond to this, would he maybe say that when you say egalitarian, that's him saying utopia? Yeah, maybe, but I think the idea that... like utopia i think there is this idea of it as it's it's it is a kind of reconciled collective right like i think

And you think he's doing that or that's just like – Well, I think the word bears that. Okay. But I do think that in his book American Utopia, which we're going to get to – Maybe at the end, I feel like that is him doing it. So I do feel like there is some of that. So I mentioned Mac Davis before. He once said to me, utopia is nostalgia projected into the future. Yeah, that's a pretty good line. I just think it's a great – and he's a great psychoanalytic thinker, and I think that he's –

He, by the way, told me, like, it's okay. You can have that line. And this is, again, one of those lines that you can't take for yourself because it's just too good. We said this, I think, in several episodes, and then we haven't said it in a while, but it's his line that Lacan socializes Freud.

Yes, right. Because people have written to us about that before. Yeah, that's his line too. Right. That's a great one. He has some good, all of his best lines don't come in his books. That's really, well, too bad. It's like, well, isn't that like, we say this about our, em right like the best that's right that's right hits yeah the hits are not the where that's at that's for sure yeah yeah no harbor coat baby yeah incredible

Okay, I want to engage more in this thing. So what you're trying to say is that... I think you're trying to underline two things. That there is an existential dimension of psychoanalysis that is not fully integrated in what Jameson argues. And that there is a psychoanalytic dimension that has to be added to Marxism that is not added when he talks about utopia. Not added fully. Not added fully. Because I think, again, I don't want to underestimate that.

great contribution that he makes of psychoanalysis to Marxism. He's incredible on that. But I do think there is this final... dimension that where his Marxism, I guess what one would say is for me in the end, my psychoanalytic bent outweighs my commitment to Marxism and for him it's the opposite. I think that's probably what is true. I will say this. I am... I'm on the side of the idea that when we think about the death drive, we have to have room for the idea of undermining oneself.

into better circumstances. I agree. I agree. It's not out yet, obviously, but I try to write about this a little bit. I think where I would begin to try to work with the objection that you raised to the idea of the Jameson utopia where trauma is not... front and center, I think that's maybe where I would start. Is there a way, could that be a model? And again, just to go back to the thing, he tried to...

really play this out. These are the biggest things you could think. I'm tossing this out now live as you're hearing it, so I don't have the step after this worked out, but I do think that... It would be a worthwhile venture to move from the idea of, to imagine the drive at the center of a collective imagination for society, but it is a drive of undermining into

into the new and the uncomfortable and potentially the better. I think that's very good. I think it's very good. I mean, it's sort of contra Lee Edelman for sure. Yes, that's true. But an interesting... Yeah, I find that very compelling, actually. And then, I mean, just to move on, like I think his... The postmodernism book, which was the occasion for this Jameson class that I took, I think one of the things that's really remarkable about him is that...

I think most people would write a book like Political Unconscious and then keep writing a book like The Political Unconscious again and again and again, right? Like, I think that that's...

I mean, I think I do that. Like I keep writing, like you've read one, you've kind of read them all. And I feel like there's a lot of thinkers for whom that's true. And he's not one of those thinkers. Like he really... he really genuinely moves on like he's done a thing he moves on to something and it's not just and I think that what I mean by me doing that is like i think okay i'm just in a new territory but kind of doing my same thing sure and i think he he he doesn't do that like he

His book called Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, that is an entirely – there's no – Gramozian rectangles. There's no structural analysis informed by the dialectics of history. There's none of that. Like it's just a totally, and it's not like he's given that up and betrayed himself. It's like, no, he's moving on to this new way of analyzing culture and thinking of it.

I mean, again, I think what's great is he's thinking about this cultural form that he calls postmodernism, which everyone knows I have a beef with that term. But I think he – This is the one place actually where I don't have a beef with it. Because I think he's defining it in this very interesting way. He's not just using it as a toss-off word. And I think the one thing I really like about this is...

He clearly links, and I think this sounds simplistic and reductively Marxist, but I think it's not done enough, right? He clearly links realism to competitive capitalism. modernism to monopoly capitalism, and then... post what he calls post-modernism to what he calls late capitalism he takes the term from ernest mandel which ernest mandel his book late capitalism is the economic it's a book on economics it's the economic background

And Jameson says this. This is not my analysis. This is the economic background of Jameson's book. And so I feel like that kind of analysis really just kind of pops things into a... sort of clarity that they didn't have hitherto. And I think one of the great things, this is actually on the cover. Andy Warhol's diamond dust shoes. And then in the book, you see Heidegger's analysis of Van Gogh's peasant shoes and how one is a real modernist.

icon right and the other one and like there's something different about these shoes and I feel like there's so much in that the way he captures this shift And he doesn't just say like, oh, commodification. He doesn't use any, like medium is the message. He doesn't have any of these kind of...

Neil Postman, we're amusing ourselves to death. He doesn't make this kind of stuff. Nothing against that, but it's much more sophisticated, right? He's like saying, no, there's a certain kind of economic form and we can see the cultural form that corresponds. to it. And I just feel like that really made an impression on me as just a remarkable kind of way to analyze how things...

how things go. And I really, that, that ended up really taking me for a while, like really captured me in my way of thinking. You know, I just want to, I think that, so. You snapped a couple things in place. I want to say, actually, that is so influential for you because when you say... Tell me if you agree. And actually, no, you know what? I'm right. So even if you disagree, I'm right about this. I think that when you're often on the side of like, does something have an idea?

And this is your take on film and television. Is there an idea here? Is there a concept that's being articulated? I kind of think that comes from Jameson. I think Jameson maybe taught you that because what you just said about he doesn't have the line. What you're saying is there's not a catchphrase. It's not like when John Lovitz was... the heyday of John Lovitz on Saturday Night Live, what was his catchphrase?

Do you remember? I don't remember. You remember? Yeah, that's the ticket. That was his catchphrase. So all the different lead, the big actors for a certain time, they had like... The catchphrase, and that's what you went through. McLuhan means a lot to my work, but it's true that when people think about McLuhan, they think the line, the medium, is the message. What they don't think is like...

or maybe again, this is me doing this live. If I was writing this in an essay, I think maybe I articulate it differently, but like it's the, like the, his, like McLuhan's idea of medium gets, uh, just put right into that line. Jameson's idea of form, I don't think can be concretized in a single line, but that doesn't make it diffuse. It is concept, I want to say. It is concept...

pure. That's maybe what I would want to underline from that, and what I want to take from you. I think that is what you gravitate toward. It's not the catchphrase that encapsulates the idea, but the idea... like lifts out of the work And it is larger than the words that you read to understand it. Does that make sense? Absolutely, Ryan. I think it's absolutely true. And I think you used the key word, which we, for some reason, have avoided up till now. It's form, right? Like key. Yeah.

He's the great thinker. I mean, there are other ones, right? But Adorno maybe. And it's not surprising he wrote. late Marxism on Adorno, and there's an Adorno chapter, the first chapter of Marxism in form. But he's just, you know, in Marxism in form, he has this, and this speaks exactly what you're talking about, has this great little, I don't know, it's two paragraphs, one paragraph on Ernest Hemingway.

And he says, you know, you think like Hemingway's has this machismo and he uses the Hemingway sentence to express the machismo. But he goes, that's exactly the opposite. He goes, it's the... what he wants to express is the form of the Hemingway sentence. And the machismo is just the kind of content he got to fill out that form. And it's like, oh my God, like all of a sudden Hemingway.

Okay, he goes from being, and this is, I think, the right reading of Hemingway. Histories have proven this to be true. He goes from being this, like, macho asshole to being this, like, really complex. writer, thinker, and complex life, right? Like, you know, like cross-dressing and all, and sort of sexual ambiguity, and he's very interesting, right, in this way, and combined with this existentialist.

dread. And I think the notion that it's the form driving it is just like the scales come from your eyes when you read that. You're like, of course that's true. Right? Like, that's what you were saying before, I think, in the beginning of the episode, right? Like, you're like, this thing that just seems like, oh, that's just common sense. Well, it's like his other very, very famous line that...

sometimes gets credited to Slavoj, is that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, right? Like that now, Mark Fisher wrote a whole book about that. It's like that becomes... common sense but but it's a common sense because jameson said it right so i feel like that's a really and i think that the the turn to form

I think it's really hard to overestimate that because I think it's really easy as a Marxist to be reductive and to think in terms of content. And not only as a Marxist, I think as a... as a leftist, because you're constantly thinking like, is this the proper content or not? And he just never thought in those terms. He thought, you know what? You analyze the form and then...

that the form can be radical even if the content is absolutely conservative. So I think that that, I mean, this is why one of his analyses of... of anti-semitism this is in the political unconscious he he says anti and this will come back to the utopia question uh because he says even anti-semitism his point there is every ideology is also utopian because it imagines, formally at least, a collectivity. I mean, I have some problems with that, but I think what's interesting is the focus on...

The form of the – and one of his examples is anti-Semitism. Like at least anti-Semitism is formally imagining how to construct a collectivity. I mean what he misses –

I think I would say is that that collectivity relies on a fundamental exclusion. Right. And, uh, so, and I, I think like, I think he wants to like, uh, bridge the gap between ideology and utopia and maybe and see how they dialectically turn into each other but maybe they don't always right that's what i would say yeah yeah yeah no i mean it's like i i don't Again, that's just another one of those things in his intervention. One, I think the way to...

do justice and to pay fidelity with his intervention is to have this focus on form where it is so much easier to see content. And that also does tie into I think that probably the The easiest way to make, just because you mentioned him, the easiest way to make McLuhan relevant is to pair him with Jameson. For sure. It dresses up. It's like a nice blazer with just your favorite pair of jeans. Who's the jeans and who's the blazer in this scenario? Well, the jeans is McLuhan, the blazer is Jameson.

I mean, you know, that's just, I mean, so, but, um, but anyway, the, the, the sharp, sharp blazer, but still comfortable. Anyway, um, it's a people's blazer, man. Yeah, that's the thing. You see it, you're like, you know what, that's nice. It's not trying to make me feel insecure. Anyway, so that's one thing, I think. question of form, which we could maybe talk a little bit more on. This other thing, I think the idea that like...

Like, looking at ideology and utopia as having this, like, intrinsic relationship to each other. Like, again, it's just another one of these things that you think, like, that's common sense after you read it. I think he's coming upon where the... where the antagonism is that requires working through that. That's maybe what I would say about his work in Utopia, which I'll get into my thing. I really like this little essay he wrote. I think it was in...

because of the launch of An American Utopia, the collection of essays of which he has one and then a kind of an epilogue. I mean, it's basically, I think he got friends of his to write responses to his... essay American Utopia. I think that's what it is. Yeah, and there's great essays in there. Yeah, it's great. But he has, like I said, there's this thing, it's called Walmart as Utopia. And what he...

His idea, this little dialectical turn in there that I think is really novel, is Walmart's, I don't know if they still use this as their slogan, but when I was working there and when he wrote this, what their slogan was, save money, live better. That was their slogan. He gets into, how does that happen? How is Walmart able to have you save money? It's because they are ruthless in underpaying...

suppliers, underpaying their workers, they go into areas like towns and localities and they absolutely kill local business. They destroy local... mom and pop stores as they say absolutely and I think in I can't remember the last time I saw a map of this but they were edging toward the like in most In over half of US states, they are the single largest employer in this country. And they may be now. I'm not sure. I don't have the things in front of me.

He locates this thing that they are the reason why somebody who works there or shops there needs to save money. Because they are the thing that has crushed the economy to this point where they're the necessary thing you have to engage with. to try to stretch your meager paycheck a little bit. And his twist on that is like, can't the thing that is responsible...

for the form of living that requires bargain shopping from everybody and bargain cheap goods. Can't the form that does that be flipped to do the opposite? I think it's, again, you might say basic dialectical move, only if most people did that, and most people don't. The basic move there is a duality. Because we don't think dialectically, basically. Not as a first impulse. And I think that there's a recent...

Somebody articulated this in an article. So I don't know if you know about how the ocean temperature has risen quite dramatically this past year. And one of the reasons for it... climate scientists have looked at is that there was a change in what chemicals like ocean liners, like tankers were used, could use to like...

power their ships. Because there would always be this thing where there'd be low-level clouds that would follow ships on their route, and those clouds would be produced by the ships themselves. And those clouds that were being produced had toxic pollution chemicals. So then there was a...

This was considered to be a great victory for the climate and for the earth that they could no longer be using these polluting chemicals. Okay, so what's happened is that now it doesn't... produce clouds anymore, and those clouds actually had a huge effect on cooling the ocean.

But I read someone talking about this who knows what they're talking about in an article. I wish I remembered where it was from. And what they said was, rather than this seeming like an absolute disaster for climate policy, or that they should offer an apology for, I can condense those two words, that this person observed, it kind of says that it is that easy. If just... one change to ocean liners can make this like a couple of degree difference in the ocean, then...

there has to be a way to create the clouds that follow the ocean liners that doesn't just throw pollution. Yeah, and I thought, that is a really interesting dialogue. It's like Jameson's Walmart essay. It's exactly Jameson's Walmart essay. And this isn't his point, but I'll just tell you, when I... when I, you know, when I worked there, like I went, so I worked there for a month before I got in the car accident and nearly ended my life. And I came back.

two, three months after the... the accident and it was because I just like I needed to be out of the house and I needed something to do that wasn't just be injured and I was going through therapy like outpatient rehab like I did that for like six months Walmart What is the line when Orson Welles is doing the Mrs. Buckley's Peas?

The depth of your ignorance? Is that the line that he yells at that guy? So Walmart, in the depth of their ignorance, they allowed a person to work there who had like six and a half inches of his skull missing. Like they, and like, I look back at this and like absolute horror. that they let me do this. I had to go through all these things. They had to wait for the swelling to go down. I had to get imaging of my skull done. They had to make the prosthetic, the titanium wire.

mesh filled in with bone substitute they had to do that whole thing and it had to be at a time like where I was healthy enough that I could go back into surgery they were going to reopen the scar that they had to cut into my head to take the damaged fractured skull out in the first place. So it was for six months, I had no, I had, like I said, six and a half in diameter, but kind of...

circular of that much of my skull missing. And they just let me work there. And I want to say this on the side of Utopia. I really needed that. Because I'm now on this other thing. I would rather... I think this is common amongst people who have an invisible disability. One, that they feel like, well, I can pass as someone who doesn't have one, so I shouldn't...

like mention it or bring it up because other people can't and they need more, which is true. Um, so there's like a little bit of a shame in it, but there's also like, I like at that. I'm trying to get over this. I'd rather people think I was rude or aloof or something than that I was disabled and couldn't do something. And when I worked at Walmart, just everyone treated me like everybody else. So you did have that utopian feeling there.

I did. Yeah, I did. It's not exactly what Jameson gets at in that essay, but because I think you could get that anywhere. And you could also get there with... that kind of healthcare that doesn't bankrupt you, like that kind of thing, right? So there's those aspects to it. And again, this has nothing really to do with Walmart, but it is this, I do think there are ways to talk about

utopia that Jameson opens up that I think could be discussed more in our thing. And I just think that it's one of those... There's obviously a way of... of talking about normality that is like repressive and does aim to single people out. But there is, if we're going to follow Jameson, there's another way of talking about it that like, you know,

It is sometimes nice to be treated just like everybody else when you're going through something that is not what everybody else is going through, but you just have to take a vacation from it. Yeah, sorry. Isn't that the genius of... David Lynch's Elephant Man, right? Like he just wants to lie down like everybody does. I mean, it's not like he wants, and I think that's pretty...

I think that's pretty common, right? Like it's not that he wants some, and he wants the opposite of special treatment. Like, and I think that's what you were saying. Like you, yes. And I think that's, I think there's something about special treatment. Yeah. I think there's something about that in Jameson's.

In Jameson's vision, for sure. And then I think it's interesting because this leads, and this essay was written to promote American Utopia, which is his, I think it's his last major work, probably. It was a work – you already described it, how it has these responses in it. But it was – his idea of utopia was to universalize the military because in the military we get –

free healthcare, there's a kind of relative equality, there's all these things. I just want to interrupt. It's an American utopia, so the idea is, is there an existing model? When we think of utopia... One of the basic ideas is that higher education and healthcare should be free. Is there any existing system that guarantees that in American society?

the military so that's that was his starting point right that's a starting point and then and then so and he also notes the popularity of the military right like it's one thing that whereas social spending people argue about

Military spending, they tend to argue about who can spend more on it, right? And so I think that's another thing that's attracted to them about it. I guess my issue, again, my issues with utopia as such, but I think- i can't imagine and he doesn't really address this in the book i can't imagine a military that doesn't isn't focused its entire energy on the enemy and so yeah

That enemy, it seems to me like once you're in the situation with the enemy, you're off the terrain of the left altogether. To me, it's no surprise that Carl Schmitt, the great Nazi theorist, believes that politics depends on having an enemy, right? Like I think, and I think that that is something, whenever I hear leftists say, our enemies are, I always think like, okay, you've left the terrain of the left altogether. Because- Of course, we have adversaries that we're – but the point –

Of the left as I understand it or as egalitarianism as I understand it or socialism as I understand it or communism as I understand it is you're saying to other people like, no, no, you're really on our side. You might not know it, but – you're, it's, it's really to, to follow your, to get the satisfaction you want, come onto our side, right? It's not about like, we're going to defeat your side. We're going to own your side to use the contemporary lingo. Right. So I, and I feel like.

I can't imagine a military without an enemy. And I think the only reason people are so invested in the military is because there is an enemy to fight. Like imagine you took the enemy away, people would be like, well, this is no better than like funding people on welfare. Right? Like, what's the... So, I feel like, to me, that's a real issue with the book, I guess. Okay. Response? That's my response. Okay. I'm going to try to take up from...

Jameson's side of things. What he writes in his section is that I think he acknowledges the problem that you're laying out and maybe you think this is an elision from him. I would want to hear if you do think that's true. His solution is that the military has to be effectively demilitarized so that the military becomes this universal distributor. of goods and services. And that the enemy, if you like, that it is purposed with eradicating is...

Now, you think that's just too slick? Yeah, I just think that the libidinal investment in the military comes from the fact that it's fighting a real enemy. Sorry, you don't get the one without the other, in my view. So that's why I think it's utopian in the worst sense of the word. It's utopian thinking. No, no, no. I got you. That's tricky.

I'm just, I'm just wondering if the, yeah, I don't have, I don't have this. I don't have the next step for you. I like, I see why he did, why he did that. Yeah, no, I see. Look, it's, it's, it's courageous. It's like incredible. I, I'm not, I'm not. I'm not calling it existentially into question. I'm just saying I don't agree, but I still think, thank God it exists as a text and I'm glad someone's trying to do it and et cetera, et cetera. And I want to say.

so i want to turn because i i i want to we're both in film and media studies and i think jameson's what's interesting is i think his influence has probably been more in that area than literary studies, I think. Yeah. You know, which is interesting. And he wrote primarily, I think there are two texts. So one called Signatures of the Visible.

And then another called The Geopolitical Aesthetic. And I think one of the things that strikes me about both those books is they're absolutely unteachable to undergrads. And I say that from experience. Like they're just – Jameson is not the kind of writer that is – like I think you and I are, for better or worse, right? Like we're writing basically so undergrads can read our thing and it's fine, right? Like even my book on Hegel, I tried to make it so...

a normal, like my mom could, she couldn't, but that my mom could read it. Right. So I, and he doesn't, he doesn't care if his mom could read his book or not. Right. Like he just doesn't care about that. And I think that nowhere is that. more pronounced than in signatures visible and geopolitical aesthetic the the main the main cinema books right like and it's even hard i have to say to find a jameson essay that's really accessible to to

to teach to a group of undergrads when they're not going, I didn't understand anything that he said. I say this, again, from total experience. But I think that I want to mention one essay from... Both are kind of collections of essays, right? Wouldn't you say they're not necessarily coherent? They're just kind of different things are together. But the...

It's not like a monograph. It's not a monograph, right. But in both books, he's doing, especially in geopolitical aesthetic, he's doing this thing that in a certain way, he's... maybe more known for than anything else. And so it's odd we haven't mentioned it yet, which is cognitive mapping, right? Like he's trying to say that the films that he's analyzing assist the spectator.

in mapping out their, the geopolitical terrain that they exist in. And that part of what- late capitalism does is it renders it almost impossible to cognitively map your geopolitical situation, right? And so you're kind of lost. You don't know how to read things. And so some of the films he analyzes... Go ahead. No, no, no. To what you're saying, it is... I do think you're right that it's hard to teach at the undergrad level, but I'm struck because...

At both UVM and URI when I was a grad student in teaching classes, his idea of cognitive mapping was basically... what undergirded the rhetoric and composition idea of what the writing class should be. Very interesting, I know. So on the one hand, it's almost a dialectical thing here, right? Yeah. The direct apprehension for a typical undergraduate class, like non-specialist, not students who are preparing themselves to go to graduate school is a little difficult.

that same idea, those same essays, is exactly the thing that structures the first year writing class that everyone has to take. that is meant to be accessible for everyone no matter where they're coming in to the college, no matter what experience level, no matter what major they're going to go on to. I was just struck by that when you were talking about that. I hadn't made that connection before. It's a great point.

Again, I think it's odd that he's absolutely unteachable, except at a grad level. Except at a grad level. He's just unteachable. Like I taught, this is actually an essay from- geopolitical aesthetic. I think it's called Totality as Conspiracy. Is that right? Or to have it backwards? Something. I think that's it. I think it's Totality as. It might be Conspiracy as. But I think it's Totality as Conspiracy.

I got death threats from teaching that essay. So I really – I'm just barely exaggerating. People were pissed. Like they stood outside my office ready to kick the shit out of me for that. So – And I kind of understood where they're coming from. But I think one of the things that's interesting about that is that he takes this thing that, okay, we're hopefully all... How can we say? Right-thinking people are against conspiracy theory, right? And he shows how...

Even in conspiracy theory, which he's not a conspiracy theorist, but even in the – and I do have to say it's the conspiracy theory of the 70s. conspiracy thriller right it's not the conspiracy theories that are dominant today so it's not he's not talking about anti-vax or things that my uh I won't say. No, don't do that. Yeah, I won't do that. He's not talking about that. But he's nonetheless, nonetheless, right? He's saying,

there's something in this conspiracy theory that it's an attempt, like say Three Days of the Condor, because he does talk about the film, or All the President's Men, right? They're trying to map in lieu of... like a collective organization, they're helping the individual to map how this structure of control and dominance works in their lives. And so when Redford is struggling against the CIA within the CIA and doesn't know what, you know, like that and is kind of lost.

Like that's the lostness of the contemporary subject. And the film is trying to help that subject find a way to think about things. And it's a fascinating, again, it's not a beacon of. but it's a fascinating argument. And I think it's real. And in that, in Signature of the Visibility is a great essay on The Shining, which is. I should say my colleague and friend Tony Magistrali teaches that essay on The Shining because we did a little, our English department, there was a little kind of mourning.

celebration of the life of Frederick Jameson. And he said, I teach that essay. And I thought he's a better professor than I am because he can teach that to undergrads. But there's a lot of great stuff in his analysis of the film. part of the thing that's great is it cuts against, like you think conspiracy theory bad, but he ends up.

without being a conspiracy theorist it's kind of like what you're saying about walmart he's not a pro walmart person no no no but he's able to see this thing within even the thing that's despised it kind of comes back to what we're saying about structuralism right like even the thing he's attacking

he's able to grasp this thing that's really valuable in it. And I think, who does that, right? Who does that? I just don't think, I don't know of anybody else who does it. And so I've probably been unfairly critical of him, but now I want to say. To me, the greatest compliment is I don't really know another thinker that is as generous to the position he's attacking and is able to find something valuable in what he attacks than Jameson.

You know what it is, Todd? One of the things that I think is most inspiring in Hegel is what he manages to do with phrenology. At that moment in phenomenology, but expanded into a career of developing and really... building something with that. It's not the same. Every place that he picks to do that, to make that move, I think it really unveils something. It's remarkable. Can I really piss off a lot of people? Here's what I'm going to say. I think he's a secret Hegelian who got derailed.

by Marx that's what I think that's what I think and I think for exactly the reason you said right like it's like he every moment in his career is like the phrenology Which is the brilliant section, really, of the phenomenology, right? Like, Hegel's not an idiot. He knows phrenology is... I mean, actually, at the time, there were people that were serious phrenologists, and he had foresight to see that it's stupid.

But he sees also that there's this like one moment of incredible genius within it, right? And then Jameson does that. It's like time. It's like he wrote, just like you said, he wrote that section again and again and again throughout his life. It's just amazing. Yeah. No, no, no. Yeah. he was able to get the spirit as the bone out of Walmart, out of conspiracy, out of so many other things. Yeah, so, I mean, I don't know. I know that we said this in the...

The Mari episode, this is one of your takeaways, is your worry when someone passes is that the thing that they were is gone from the world. And I would really hope that... that the thing that Jameson was able to concretize is very much not gone. I hope it's not gone, but I think we need it. I have to say that I don't know of another person who does it. Right? Like, I don't know.

I really don't know. Like I have other thinkers, obviously I prefer to Jameson, but I don't know another thinker that is able to do that thing where he finds this point of genius in the thing that he's absolutely opposed to.

I just don't know. I don't know of anyone that does that. I don't do it. I don't know of anyone that does it. Maybe that's the gauntlet. Yeah, that's the gauntlet laid down. To pick it up. The best way to... you know to memorialize someone is to really try to take up what was best about them i think absolutely yeah that's right absolutely so um

What's the lesson, Tom McGowan? Is it Elephant Man? I think the lesson has to be, because Jameson doesn't talk about that film, but yeah, I think it has to be watch Elephant Man and see that the kind of... Jameson is helping us to think of normality as emancipatory. And that is a tough thing to think. Man. Oh, great take. That's great. Over and out. Over and out, Todd. Bye.