Marxism Theory Fredric Jameson, Lucien Goldmann & Louis Althusser
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Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson is a neo-Marxist critic who is known for his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. His writings include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981). He has been a leading Marxist literary critic of America.
Jameson’s early writings were mostly influenced by German philologist Erich Auerbach who was his professor at Yale University. Following the German philological tradition, he studied the style and existential elements of Sartre’s works and published Sartre: the Origins of a Style. The study of Sartre’s works and his concern with the political movement New Left led him to study Marxist literary theory.
Jameson’s book The Political Unconscious is chiefly concerned with the importance of history in the interpretation of literary texts. The book dwells upon ideas of structuralism, Raymond William’s cultural studies and the Marxist concept of labor. Jameson’s focal idea in the book is that history serves as the “ultimate horizon” for the analysis of literary texts.
Jameson’s other book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is an analysis of the late 20th-century movement postmodernism through the dialectical approach.
Jameson argued that postmodernist cultures are formed through mass culture. It is a capitalist phenomenon that forces our ideologies to be shaped. The process of this formation is what Jameson called hegemony in the postmodern world.
For him, postmodernism brought a new mode of artistic production as the end of traditional ideologies. Hence, postmodernism is characterized by a rejection of ideologies of modernism.
Jameson also argued against postmodernists’ claim that the differentiation between different fields of life and between social classes is overcome. It was a postmodernist attempt to bring all discourse into a uniform whole.
Jameson stressed that this postmodernist attempt was a failure of understanding and a result of the emergence of corporate capitalism. Jameson also incorporated these ideas into the realms of architecture, film and visual arts.
In the very book, Jameson talks of two aspects of postmodernism which are pastiche and a crisis of historicity. Pastiche, as a work of art that juxtaposes different artistic compositions, replaced parody which is simply an imitation of an original work. According to Jameson, this is how postmodernism attempted to merge different aspects into a uniform whole.
Another aspect, the crisis in historicity is what postmodernity suffers from. For Jameson, history learned in schools has no relation to the everyday life. This is what he considers a crisis in the historicity of the postmodernist era.
Lucien Goldmann
Lucien Goldman was born in Bucharest, Romania. He studied law, political economy, literature and philosophy at universities in Bucharest, Vienna and Zurich. He is regarded as a humanist socialist. He himself called his work dialectical as well as a humanist. In the 1960s, he developed the theory of “genetic structuralism” and is known as its founder.
Goldman is one amongst those Marxist thinkers (Lois Althusser and Pierre Macherey) who moved away from the Hegelian line of thought and were under the influence of structuralist movement which was a rejection to the individual agency in favor of the broader system or structure that constructs the individual agency.
On the one hand, Louis Althusser’s structuralist Marxism is a rejection to the traditional Marxist view that favored humanist and historicist readings of Marx and authorial intention in literary texts.
On the other hand, Goldman Goldmann was averse to the idea of individual creativity. He held the view that texts are productions of larger mental structures and accepts the idea that mental structures are social construct. He developed the idea of “homology” to explain the roleplay of larger social forces and principles in literary texts. In his attempt, he sees parallels between artistic and social forms.
Goldmann attempted to bring together the genetic epistemology of Piaget and Marxist view of Lukacs and founded the theory of genetic structuralism. This attempt was made in his book The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pesees of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine.
The book, on the one hand, aims at developing a scientific method to study literary and philosophical works. On the other hand, it traces a link between a set of texts with their differences.
In the preface to this book, Goldmann views that “facts concerning man always form themselves into significant global structures, which are at one and the same time practical, theoretical and emotive. He further emphasizes the scientific study of these structures in order that they are comprehensible within a practical perspective with a set of values.
Following this method, Goldmann explores “the tragic vision” which, he says, helped him understand and analyze the essence of phenomena of theology, philosophy and literature and their relationships which were unnoticed before.
His concept of tragic thought in the book concerns with the coherent unity of Pensees rather than its fragments. He studies the coherent unity through a general method and leaves the fragments to readers so that they are able to see if the fragments fit his general pattern or not.
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher of the twentieth century. He is best known for his concept of structuralist Marxism. He was a member of the French Communist Party but his association with the party never prevented him to turn critical of the party. His ideas influenced a generation of philosophers such as Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault.
Two of his major works For Marx (1965) and Reading Capital (1965) are set against the predominant interpretation of Marxism under Hegelian purview. The Hegelian approach towards Marxism ignores Marx’s epistemological break that is focused on the development of new science to look at the historical processes rather than historical subjects.
Althusser’s idea of historical change gave importance to the relationship between forces and relations of production rather than consciousness. This emphasis on objective factors was an attempt to rescue Marxism from existential notions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Marleau-Ponty.
The effort was further supported by philosophers such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. In his attempt, Althusser brings Marxism and Structuralism together, a fusion of historical analysis and a historical analysis.
In his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser redefines the Marxist theory of ideology. The essay studies the relation between the state and its subjects. Althusser explains two mechanisms of the state (RSA and ISA) that control the behavior of the people. Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA), Althusser says, is directly applied to the people’s behavior. Courts, police and armed forces are such apparatuses.
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), on the other hand, are institutional tactics which generate ideologies in an indirect manner. Institutions such as religions, politics, schools, family, arts, and literature are based on the system of ideas. Individuals within these institutions are trained in order that they internalize the ideas and values generated by these systems.
Althusser further explains the difference between ideologies and ideology. He argues that ideologies have history and are specific and differing. There can be various ideologies such as Marxist ideology, feminist ideology, and democratic ideology.
On the other hand, ideology has no history, it is structural. His idea of ideology pertains to the Marxist concept of the superstructure of which ideology is considered apart. Althusser links this notion of ideology to Freudian and Lacanian concepts of the unconscious.
He then explains that Ideology as form or structure functions unconsciously and can contain several contents. Althusser thinks that the belief in the free choice of the content is illusory since ideology has an unconscious roleplay.
