Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (review)

Darren Jorgensen
symploke, Volume 15, Numbers 1-2, 2007, pp. 396-398 (Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
DOI: 10.1353/sym.0.0022
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Queen's University, Belfast (28 Apr 2014 09:22 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sym/summary/v015/15.1-2.jorgensen01.html
396 Book Notes

content. Moreover, even the paradoxes of the early !i"ek are not the content of
his discourse but represent a refined rhetoric for evoking the Lacanian Real, a
register of existence that resists signification absolutely and so can only be
approached through those moments in which the Symbolic systematically fails to
disambiguate itself.
In the end, one may agree or disagree with !i"eks rehabilitation of a
muscular Christianity in the name of dialectical materialism, but to reduce this
peculiar conjunction of thought to pure paradox is to conflate rhetorical gesture
with the object of analysis. Of course, the two levels can never be completely
disentangled, and every field of discourse creates its own object of analysis. But
to say that a discourse and its object are one and the same is to commit a vulgar
error. Sophocles Antigone may no longer be completely separable from the
terms of Lacans reading of it in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, but both he and !i"ek
would be the last people to claim it has no existence outside that discourse per
se. Likewise to say that Lacans unconscious is textual because he uses graphs to
formalize it is to conflate signifier, signified, and referent in a most elementary
way.
Paul Allen Miller, University of South Carolina


Ian Buchanan. Fredric Jameson: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2007.
152 pp.

One of the most influential theorists of literature, culture, and theory itself,
Fredric Jameson has only recently been the subject of the book-length authorial
studies we expect to surround such major figures of the intellectual scene. It may
well be that the sheer complexity of Jamesons work, unfolding over the decades,
has confounded previous attempts at such projects. The various discourses into
which Jameson has intervened requires an exhaustive knowledge of these
different debates, whose significance only becomes clear in retrospect. It is
difficult to look past the triad of theoretical blockbusters Marxism and Form
(1971), The Political Unconscious (1981), and Postmodernism (1991) in any account
of Jamesons work, and they serve here as navigation markers in the ocean of
Jamesons production. The problem for any appraisal of Jameson lies in their
evident difference, in the ways in which they employ very different strategies to
address very different subjects.
The quality of Ian Buchanans book is to identify these changing method-
ologies, to discover in an aside on causality here or a book on Brecht there the
most persistent of Jamesons interpretive tools and working models. The
enduring tropes of reflexivity, historical determinism, allegory, interpretation,
periodisation, and the cultural dominant are some of the keys to Jamesons
heady blend of Marxism and theory. Unlike so many other authorial studies,
Buchanan is not concerned with reconciling these with each other, and thus with
the singularity of Jameson, but instead to account for the initial possibility of
thinking them together. The ways in which this or that distinctive constellation
of meaning is revealed as a part of some greater ideological operation is the
Jamesonian effect. Buchanan describes that way that it comes to us as an
experience of shock on the level of the sentence. Such epiphanies will be familiar
to readers of Jameson, as the juxtaposition of unlike elements mediates the
symploke 397

fragments of lived cultural reality with history. Bridging the sentences with the
strategy, Buchanan helps us come closer to thinking the continuities that we have
come to expect from a major thinker.
This mediation of the molar and molecular marks Buchanans book from
previous apprehensions of Jamesons oeuvre, that have so often become lost in
stylistics or been seduced by the debates that have followed in his wake.
Buchanans is instead a sympathetic account, in the mode of Geoffrey
Benningtons Lyotard: Writing the Event (1988), or Rex Butlers seminal Jean
Baudrillard: The Defense of the Real (1999). The intimacy these writers have with
the theorists they discuss verges on identification, such that Butler did not know
whether he had in the process of writing become Baudrillard, and Buchanans
lengthy sentences come to resemble Jamesons. Buchanans distillation of
causality, the dialectic, figuration, metacommentary, and cognitive mapping are
the most exacting we possess, because they reveal through identification the
force of their logic. They are attuned to the sense such strategies make in
situation, of how they can be assembled into a dialectical conception of history.
If there is a larger continuity to Jamesons oeuvre, it lies in this dialectical
sentence, a shift from the specific to the general that takes place from phrase to
phrase. Buchanan works to demystify the perplexing obscurities of the dialectic,
to make its operation comprehensible and useful.
Much of the originality of Buchanans account here lies in a chapter that
maps Jamesons influences, in Sartre, Adorno, Barthes, and Brecht. Here lies
cause for complaint, as one might include or exclude any number of antecedents
for Jamesons work. Lukcs and Bloch are also significant figures for under-
standing this oeuvre, especially in understanding the strategies of totalisation and
utopia. Barthes is an unusual addition to these Marxist theorists, but Buchanan
makes a case for this authors ideas on refunctioning and pleasure that could
alone lead to a reassessment of his place in a political history of theory. The
fascinating transcodings between this generation of theorists and Jamesons own
is also the subject of a rare biographical interview. Such concluding interviews
are a signature of Continuums Live Theory series. Unsurprisingly, Jamesons
personal history blurs into the history of the left, in a revisitation of the Cold War
that inevitably brings up the question of the place of the left and theory amidst
globalization. Buchanan concludes his book with a view to refashioning the
corpus of Jamesons intellectual armoury to enact a speedy deconstruction of this
term and the powers that have determined its cultural dominance.
What is striking about Buchanans account of Jamesons place in the history
of theory is the degree of forgetting that necessitates his revision. The series of
theory wars that occasioned Jamesons rise to prominence in the academy, from
the introduction of Adorno, Bloch, and even Benjamin to English speakers, to the
controversy over Postmodernism and Consumer Society (1983), are today the
territory of specialists. A new generation of scholars are coming of age without
the requisite knowledge of Marxism and even cultural studies or postmodernism
that once centrally situated Jamesons work. The deeper lesson of Buchanans
book may well lie in mapping the continuities of this past to the globalizing
present, as Jamesons tools for dismantling the engine of history lie dormant in
debates that are often as difficult and complex as the history of the twentieth
century itself. In Buchanans hands the so-called victory of capitalism points not
to the economic inevitability of this system, but instead reveals the sense of a
398 Book Notes

dialectical Marxism that has specialised in exposing its intricate complexities. As
he points out, the further capitalism progresses in embedding itself as a world-
system, the more relevant Jameson becomes to thinking the intricacies of this
system.
Darren Jorgensen, University of Western Australia


Michael Ruse. Darwinism and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2006. 326 pp.

Biology is hot, as all informed people will have noticed, due not only to a
creationist resurgence, nor only to stunning scientific developments since the
discovery of DNA. The creationist controversy and genetic engineering get the
biggest headlines, but biologys in-house debates about evolution are showing
equally significant philosophical resonance: about the reducibility of biology to
physics, about the explanatory adequacy of natural selection, about the propor-
tionate influence and nature and nurture, and even about the nature of science
itself. Not since the Scopes trial has the power and scope of philosophical
naturalism been so much in question, yielding a burgeoning literature ranging
from the popular to the academic. In that literature, the works of Michael Ruse
(philosopher and historian of science) address a remarkably wide audience with
scholarly literacy and a writing style notable for its lucidity and wit.
Darwinism and Its Discontents is Ruses most comprehensive look at Darwin-
ism to date. Beginning with historical background (chapter 1), he establishes the
core fact of evolution (chapter 2), and proceeds with chapter-length accounts of
the sorts of problems that test the limits of Darwinian theory: the origin of life,
the path of evolution, the cause of evolution, and human nature. He devotes a
chapter to the limitations and restrictions of Darwinism (chapter 6), while
chapters 8 through 12 examine the wider issues that cluster about cultural
landmarks and ideological flashpoints: factuality, professional honesty,
philosophy, literature, and religion. Ruse is well suited to such an overview. He
negotiates the terrains of history, philosophy, and theology well enough to offer
cogent versions of the central issues and their multiple sides.
Ruses own perspective is ultimately a pro-scientific agnosticism. But he
knows enough theology to recognize which theological arguments are more
consistent with science and which hold up better to philosophical scrutiny so
that his approach never degenerates into a brief for science-as-such against
religion-as-such. In his treatment of the faith-science issue, for instance, Ruse
effectively uses the theological arguments of Ernan McMullin (a catholic priest)
against fundamentalist arguments that dismiss natural evolution in favor of
miracles, showing the latter hostage to a faith in biblical literalism and inerrancy
that leave scientific arguments untouched. Similarly, Ruse shows how the
recently christened Intelligent Design movement not only inhibits science by
accepting its current gaps as final, but also raises embarrassing theological
questions about the features of nature that seem not so intelligent at best, and
cruel at worst.
Ruses view of science might be called a methodologically prudent
naturalism. That view is doubly provisional: first, by provisionally assuming
that natural sciences methods are adequate to explain nature; second, by