Resumo de Postmodernism - Jameson, Frederic

Over the last three decades Fredric Jameson has developed a
richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to
political economy. Emphasizing the connections between the
arts and the historical circumstances of their creation and
reception, Jameson charts their stylistic and ideological
movement from realism through modernism and into
postmodernism, a sequence, he argues, that parallels
capitalism's successive mutations from mercantilism and
industrialism into its later monopoly and global or
speculative stages. Jameson's guiding premise is that
cultural artifacts are oblique representations of their
historical circumstances, whose concrete social
contradictions they variously distort, repress, and
transform through the abstractions of aesthetic form. The
principal responsibility of the critic is not--as most
humanists typically assume--to enhance our appreciation of
a work's aesthetic qualities but to lay bare its roots in
political and economic conditions and to explain how and
why these roots have been obscured.
Jameson's thought
builds on the foundation of Western Marxism, a
predominantly Hegelian, non-Stalinist strain which has
evolved in Europe since the 1920s. But he does not confine
himself to this tradition. Jameson seriously engages
numerous non-Marxist approaches to art, identifies their
local validities, and deftly adapts their insights to his
own purposes. This inclusiveness produces an intellectual
method that both revitalizes classical Marxism's core
concepts and revolutionizes our understanding of the
politics of artistic practice since the nineteenth century.

Jameson's achievement is all the more remarkable since
the academic world in which he trained routinely segregated
aesthetics from politics and economics. Born in Cleveland
in 1934, he graduated from Haverford College in 1954,
before taking a doctoral degree at Yale in 1960. His first
book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961), rejected the
empiricism and logical positivism that have long dominated
universities in this country and England. In contrast to
the bankruptcy Jameson found in this "Anglo-American
philosophy, Sartre's existentialism provided a completely
different model of the political intellectual.
During
the early 1960s Jameson's interest in Sartre shifted to the
philosopher's Marxist theory. The culmination of this move
was Jameson's second book, Marxism and form (1971), a
pioneering account of Western Marxism's major thinkers from
Georg Lukacs and Ernst Bloch through the central figures of
the seminal Frankfurt School -- T. W. Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse -- concluding with the later
Sartre of Search for a Method and Critique of Dialectical
Reason. Not only were these writers largely unfamiliar to
most English-language readers when Marxism and Form first
appeared, but their mode of dialectical thinking was also
the very antithesis of Anglo-American empiricism. Acutely
self-reflective, deliberately anti-systematic, rigorously
anti-metaphysical, and relentlessly totalizing, dialectical
criticism emerges from Jameson's book as a radical
alternative to the kind of humanistic thinking habitual to
the English-speaking academy.
While Marxism and Form
emphasizes Marxism as a manner of critical thought,
Jameson's next major work, The Political Unconscious
(1981), focuses on it as the single great collective story
of humanity's struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a
realm of Necessity.This narrative and its themes Jameson
traces in the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad, though
they operate, he argues, in concealed ways in every
cultural artifact. To detect their presence he proposes
three distinct and successively broader strategies of
interpretation, each of which first dismantles the work's
aesthetic unity and then rewrites its contents in different
ways. The narroweses is the political. Here
the individual work is reconstructed as a symbolic act that
invents imaginary or formal solutions to tensions
unresolvable in its own particular historical moment. The
next level is the social, where the artifact's language and
themes are connected to the dialogue between classes, these
elements now appearing as ideologemes or "collective
characters" in class conflict. The third and most inclusive
horizon is the mode of production, which resituates the
work within its general social formation, rereading it for
the contradictory messages that arise in it from competing
economic systems.

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