Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?

Fredric Jameson

The notion of an end of theory has been accompanied by announce-

ments of the end of all kinds of other things, which have not been particu-
larly accurate. Let me begin by outlining my conception of what theory is.
I believe that theory begins to supplant philosophy (and other disciplines
as well) at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic or material
and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression.
That is something like a philosophical “heresy of paraphrase,” and it at once
excludes and forestalls a great deal of philosophical and systematic writing
organized around systems or intentions, meanings and criteria of truth and
falsity. Now critique becomes a critique of language and its formulations,
that is to say, an exploration of the ideological connotations of various
formulations, the long shadow cast by certain words and terms, the ques-
tionable worldviews generated by the most impeccable definitions, the ide-
ologies seeping out of seemingly airtight propositions, the moist footprints
of error left by the most cautious movements of righteous arguments. This
is to say that theory—as the coming to terms with materialist language—
will involve something like a language police, an implacable search and de-
stroy mission targeting the inevitable ideological implications of our
language practices; it remains only to say that for theory all uses of language,
including its own, are susceptible to these slippages and oilspills because
there is no longer any correct way of saying it, and all truths are at best
momentary, situational, and marked by a history in the process of change
and transformation. You will already have recognized deconstruction in my
description, and some will wish to associate Althusserianism with it as well.
We can indeed formulate something like an aesthetic of such writing (pro-
vided aesthetic is understood as a rigorous canon of taboos and conven-
Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004)
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404 Fredric Jameson / Symptoms of/for Theory
tions): its fundamental law would seem to be the exclusion of substantive
statements and positive philosophical propositions. All affirmative posi-
tions, in other words, are flawed and ideological because they reflect our
own personal and class (and race and gender) standpoints.
It is a mistake to assimilate this view of theory to relativism or skepticism
(leading fatally to nihilism and intellectual paralysis); on the contrary, the
struggle for the “rectification” of wording is a well-nigh interminable pro-
cess, which perpetually generates new problems. As for the overall contra-
diction of theory—how to advance the argument without actually saying
anything—it has known a variety of solutions, which can’t be enumerated
here. The single example of the neologism may suffice, the doomed attempt
to outwit the heavy baggage of actually existing language by way of post-
natural innovation. But theory’s eternal enemy, reification, quickly absorbs
and neutralizes the attempt.
What we now have to register (I’m slowly coming to the question of
theory today) is the way in which this view of thinking and writing gradually
annexes large areas of the traditional disciplines, that is to say, traditions in
which outmoded practices of representation—belief in the separation of
words and concepts—still holds sway. I am describing the process of the
expansion of theory in figures of war and domination and imperialism be-
cause theory is of course also yet another characteristic superstructural de-
velopment of late capitalism and thus displays many of the same dynamics
(although in a wholly different political valence). At any rate, what happens
during the period in which theory spreads—and the classical story is well
known: first anthropology borrows its fundamental principles from lin-
guistics, then literary criticism develops the former’s implications in a range
of new practices, which are adapted to psychoanalysis and the social sci-
ences, the law, other cultural disciplines—what happens in this process of
transfer is what I would characterize (keeping to a linguistic mode) as
wholesale translation, the supplanting of one language by another or, better
still, by one kind of language of a whole range of very different ones. What
is called the exhaustion of theory is generally little more than the completion
of this translational appropriation for this or that disciplinary area.
Now clearly there are many other ways of telling this story, which vary
according to one’s disciplinary perspective. I do feel that it has a modernist
dynamic or telos, borrowed from that modernism in the arts that no longer

F re d r i c J a m e s o n is director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke

University and a professor of French and comparative literature. Among his
recent books are A Singular Modernity (2002), Brecht and Method (1998), and The
Seeds of Time (1994).

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 Critical Inquiry / Winter 2004 405
exists; in other words the dynamic of theory has been the pursuit of the new
and, if not a belief in progress, then at least a confidence that there always
will be something new to replace the various older reified or signed theories
that have been absorbed into and domesticated by the theoretical canon.
Or is there such a thing as a theoretical canon? Is theoretical production not
already postmodern in spirit? Can we distinguish between the modernist
and the postmodernist theoretical production? For the moment, decisions
on questions like this risk lapsing into sheer opinion.
But I do think a brief review of the history of theory is in order, and this
would be my version: a first moment in which the inner structure—the
inner gap or fissure—of the concept as such is explored. This is the moment
often identified as structuralism, in which it becomes clear that concepts
are not autonomous but rather relational—both internally and exter-
nally—and in which their materiality becomes inescapable; in which, in
other words, it slowly begins to dawn on us that concepts are not ideas but
rather words and constellations of words at that.
In a second moment—sometimes called poststructuralism—this dis-
covery mutates as it were into a philosophical problem, namely, that of rep-
resentation, and its dilemmas, its dialectic, its failures, and its impossibility.
Maybe this is the moment in which the problem shifts from words to sen-
tences, from concepts to propositions. At any rate, it is a problem that has
slowly come to subsume all other philosophical issues, revealing itself as an
enormous structure that no one has ever visited in its entirety, but from
whose towers some have momentarily gazed and whose underground bun-
kers others have partially mapped out. Thus, the general issue of represen-
tation is still very much with us today and organizes so to speak the normal
science of theory and its day-to-day practices and guides the writing of its
innumerable reports, which we call articles.
Now we come to a third moment, and it is this one that I believe to be
new and imperfectly explored and the place in which original theory is still
being done today. This is the area of the political, which has always been
the property of the most retrograde academic disciplines and the most bor-
ing and old-fashioned kind of philosophizing. Suddenly these old texts and
the academic frameworks in which they were being read found themselves
transformed beyond recognition by the lightning bolt of a different kind of
philosophico-theoretical opposition, namely, that between the universal
and the particular: an opposition which is not in that form a problem (ex-
cept for an older philosophical discourse) but which immediately shatters
into all kinds of new ones, the “particular” reappearing variously in the
form of the specific, the individual, the singular, and even the virtual, while
a bad universalism hangs over everything like a doomsday cloud and gets

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406 Fredric Jameson / Symptoms of/for Theory
identified with everything from the state to the commodity form, from re-
pressive sexual norms to the identities of class analysis. This is then not some
problem that can be solved, not an opposition that can be dialectically tran-
scended, but rather a whole new theoretical coding system in which every-
thing that went before must now be reconfigured. Under the tutelary deities
of Machiavelli and Hobbes, and then of Spinoza and Carl Schmitt a whole
new kind of discourse, a genuinely theoretical political theory, emerges, re-
cast in the agonistic structure of Schmitt’s “friend and foe” and finding its
ultimate figure in war. Or at least one should say that war is the ultimate
figure in which the political is revealed; because the latter is also a construc-
tion, a defamiliarization, and a rewriting, a simplification of concrete life
in the form of a new model, I’m tempted to have recourse to Deleuze’s
notion of diagrammatization (which he develops on the occasion of Fou-
cault). Yes, thinking politically means turning representation intodiagrams,
making visible the vectors of force as they oppose and crisscross each other,
rewriting reality as a graph of power centers, movements, and velocities.
Such diagrams are the last avatar of those visual aids that mesmerized the
first structuralisms; they are the latest way to get out of ideas and into a new
form of materialization.
I am personally somewhat distant from this new moment, as I have al-
ways understood Marxism to mean the supersession of politics by econom-
ics; and I therefore want to forecast yet a fourth moment for theory, as yet
on the other side of the horizon. This one has to do with the theorizing of
collective subjectivities, although, because it does not yet theoretically exist,
all the words I can find for it are still the old-fashioned and discredited ones,
such as the project of a social psychology. One wants to think of formula-
tions (and indeed diagrams) for collectivities that are at least as complex
and stimulating as those of Lacan for the individual unconscious. These
structures have certainly been glimpsed in the various explorations of the
social or collective Imaginary in recent years. One feels that the recent phil-
osophical prestige of the Other and otherness is for the most part an ethical
simplification of these realities (save, perhaps, for some suggestions in the
Sartre of the Critique). Meanwhile, subaltern studies comes at all this from
yet another direction, and Deleuze (or Deleuze and Guattari), resolutely
post-Cartesian, offers a variety of new ways to map a whole range of col-
lective phenomena. But it is in the nature of the beast (the human animal)
to draw back from such openings; we still don’t want to hear anything about
social class; and new theoretical fashions like Giorgio Agamben’s idea of
naked life are at once read as metaphysical or existential statements or at
worst enlisted to prove—being a kind of zero degree—that the collective
does not exist (instead of being grasped as the identification of a new col-

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 Critical Inquiry / Winter 2004 407
lective planet or quark). But it is not very satisfying to talk about fields that
do not (yet) exist.
So let me turn in conclusion to literary criticism, something that has also
been pronounced dead from time to time. If so, that may be because, on
the one hand, we now have as many different methods and techniques as
any object could possibly require or, on the other hand, because of the gen-
eral volatilization of the old-fashioned work of art or if you prefer the death
of literature itself. Even literary history has accumulated impressive quan-
tities of research, which may largely suffice for a time even though the his-
torical reevaluation of this data remains as interesting a theoretical problem
as all postmodern historiography. Meanwhile there flourishes a kind of in-
sider trading on the most advanced textual sensations, from Memento to
hip-hop; but these are all textual objects, and it is pernicious to distinguish
between literature and cultural studies in the pejorative ways we are familiar
with. On all such textual criticism I want to quote a recent writer, Cesare
Casarino, who comments as follows on the old question, What is literary
criticism? “The question could have been posed differently. As if inquiring
after the health of a loved one who has been very ill for a long time, and
who has been absent from one’s daily life but all the more present because
of it in one’s daily thoughts, one could have asked: how is literary criticism?”
His answer, which I would be inclined to endorse, is what he calls philo-
poeisis, which names, he says, “a certain discontinuous and refractive in-
terference between philosophy and literature.”1 But this also names theory,
I believe.
I want to come at the question a little differently, however, and to defend
the position that literary criticism is or should be a theoretical kind of symp-
tomatology. Literary forms (and cultural forms in general) are the most
concrete symptoms we have of what is at work in that absent thing called
the social. But the idea of a symptom is often misunderstood as encouraging
a vulgar-sociological or content approach to works of art. I suppose that at
this point we could read all of Adorno’s aesthetic writings onto the record
as the supreme illustration of the intent to coordinate inside and outside
and to grasp the “windowless monad” of autonomous form as a social and
historical symptom. It might be worth adding that as much or even more
than content, form is itself the bearer of ideological messages and exists as
a social fact. To be sure, the technical questions about such delicate and
complicated coordinations are at the very center of literary theory itself.
Suffice it to say that works of the past afford all kinds of uniquely aesthetic

1. Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Exile (Minnesota, 2002),
p. xiii.

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408 Fredric Jameson / Symptoms of/for Theory
openings onto their own moment; while those of the present include all
kinds of coded data on our own—that blind spot of the present from which
we are in many ways the farthest. What we tend to neglect, however, are the
utopian projections works of past and present alike offer onto a future oth-
erwise sealed from us.
But this account of the tasks of theory and criticism has so far left out
the most distinctive feature of our own (postmodern) times, at least as far
as the aesthetic is concerned. This is very precisely that volatilization of the
individual work or text I mentioned earlier, a development that if taken
seriously determines a considerable shift in perspective and in critical prac-
tices. For is it clear that the questions raised by literary method are not
nearly so urgent or timely when significant literature ceases to be produced
or rather, putting it in a different way, when the center of gravity of some
putative “system of the fine arts” moves away from those of language and
displaces the ideal of poetic language that was central during the modernist
period?
This is why it has seemed to me that today, in postmodernity, our objects
of study consist less in individual texts than in the structure and dynamics
of a specific cultural mode as such, beginning with whatever new system
(or nonsystem) of artistic and cultural production replaced the older one.
It is now the cultural production process (and its relation to our peculiar
social formation) that is the object of study and no longer the individual
masterpiece. This shifts our methodological practice (or rather the most
interesting theoretical problems we have to raise) from individual textual
analysis to what I will call mode-of-production analysis, a formula I prefer
to those that continue to use the word culture in something of an anthro-
pological sense.
Culture in that sense is the ideological property of Samuel Huntington
and the people he has inspired. Indeed, the very war he inspired is the con-
text in which I would defend this methodological proposal because I think
that it is only in the light of the study of late capitalism as a system and a
mode of production that we can understand the things going on around us
today. Those things are not merely the acts of a fundamentalist reactionary
group around an unelected president—something that might at best be at-
tributed to sheerest accident or national bad luck; they are part and parcel
of our system, and understanding cultural production today is not the worst
way of trying to understand that system and the possibilities it may offer
for radical or even moderate change.

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