Page 194 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Postmodernism and cultural theory

Over time, however, the German theorists, especially Lukács,
Adorno and Brecht, came to occupy an increasingly prominent
place in his thinking. For Jameson, the key concept in Hegelian
dialectics, which distinguished western critical theory from Soviet
Marxism, was what Lukács had termed ‘totality’, Sartre ‘totali-
sation’. ‘There is no content, for dialectical thought’, Jameson
wrote, ‘but total content’ (Jameson, 1971, p. 306).
His most influential work of literary criticism was The Polit-
ical Unconscious, which prompted Hayden White to describe him
as ‘the best socially-oriented critic of our time’. This was
Jameson’s most Lukácsian work and also, perhaps, his most theo-
retically original. Here he developed a systematic outline of a
‘totalising’ critical method capable of subsuming other apparently
incompatible critical methods by ‘at once canceling and preserv-
ing them’ (Jameson, 1981, p. 10). He argued that the object of
inquiry for cultural analysis could be located at any of three
analytically distinct levels: ‘text’, ‘ideologeme’ and ‘ideology of
form’. Each of these has its socio-historical corollary in an equiv-
alent ‘semantic horizon’, respectively: ‘political history’, in the
sense of a chronicle-like sequence of events; ‘society’; and global
‘history’, in the sense of a sequence and succession of modes of
production (pp. 75–6). By ‘ideologeme’, Jameson meant the kind
of collective discourse in relation to which texts function as ‘little
more than...individual parole or utterance’. Since ‘society’ could
be characterised for Jameson primarily in terms of class struggle,
then it followed that the ideologeme should be defined as ‘the
smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective
discourses of social classes’ (p. 76). Class thus became one of the
key analytical tools in his critical method, providing the occasion
for a ‘double hermeneutic’, which simultaneously embraced both
the negative hermeneutic of ideology-critique and the positive of
a ‘non-instrumental conception of culture’ (p. 286). In short, all
class consciousness is a matter both of ideology and of utopia.

Postmodernism and late capitalism
The range of Jameson’s cultural reference, from architecture to
video, from conceptual art to dystopian cinema, is at its most

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