The Problem of the Future: Fredric Jameson and the Dilemmas of Left Literary Studies

i. introduction: the production of new problems

In the spring of 2021, in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, Fredric Jameson delivered a graduate seminar on postwar French thought, which appeared in book form as The Years of Theory shortly after his death in September 2024. In the outpouring of tributes, reflections, and reminiscences that followed his death, many commentators have highlighted the unique charm of the transcript, which provides not only a lucid introduction to a wide range of intellectual movements — from existentialism and structuralism to deconstruction and the de-­Marxification of French theory — but also a record of Jameson’s own evolving passions, going all the way back to his formative fascination with Jean-Paul Sartre.[1] Less frequently noted, however, is how the transcript sheds light on Jameson’s own sense of what he calls “philosophy’s task.”[2] Indeed, at the outset, Jameson motivates his seminar by describing postwar French thought as one of the great moments of philosophical effervescence in Western history — comparable to the epochs of Aristotle and Hegel — and by suggesting that what defined each of these moments was not the discovery of new solutions to old problems, but the “production of new problems” themselves.[3]

With this in mind, one might say that Jameson himself was most significant as a producer of problems, and that no thinker did more to establish the central problematics of Marxist criticism in the period he did so much to theorize — the period of “postmodernity” — than Jameson himself. After all, it would be hard to deny that he formulated a set of problems that no Marxist — and no literary or cultural critic on the left more generally — could afford to ignore. How, for example, can we reconcile structuralism and historicism, and how can we use both to understand a period whose writers and intellectuals have apparently forgotten how to think historically? How can we uncover the political potential of the irrepressible and often unconscious urge to narrativize, and to what extent does this seemingly transhistorical urge shape the dialectic of reification and utopia in the culture of postmodernism? History, totality, and utopia — not to mention Marxism, revolution, and socialism — what does it tell us about our own post-revolutionary age that it has grown allergic to these concepts? And how can we learn to think about them anew?

According to Jameson, all philosophical “problematics end up producing a certain limit beyond which they are no longer productive.”[4] And in the context of his seminar, he was primarily interested in demonstrating how successive movements within postwar French thought had produced their own limits, resulting in sudden paradigm shifts or theoretical leaps in new directions — the shift from existentialism to structuralism, for example, or from structuralism to post-structuralism. But it is tempting to pose the same question of Jameson that he posed of his precursors, not least because this is one way to honor a critic as ceaselessly self-historicizing as Jameson was. While reading Jameson on postwar French thought, in other words, it is hard not to ask: What central problematics did Jameson himself produce within the history of Marxist criticism — or within the history of philosophy and critical theory more broadly? To what extent did these problematics produce a certain limit beyond which they were no longer productive? And what new problematics, if any, have begun to replace them today, in a world that is getting harder to describe in the terms he devised? (Jameson himself concluded his seminar by asking what it might mean to “produce new problems” today, in a postmodern period of repetitions and returns: “the future of ‘the problem,’” he remarked, “is the problem of the future.”)[5]

Before we try to answer these questions, it is worth observing that there has been no shortage of attempts to define and displace the central problematics of Jameson’s work, particularly from writers who have been eager to expel his Hegelian Marxism from the discipline of literary studies. These include — to give just two examples — the much-discussed call to reject “symptomatic reading” in favor of “surface reading,”[6] and the more recent call to reject Jameson’s “historical fantasies” and “faux-interdisciplinarity” in favor of a renewed theory and practice of “judgment,” one that might help literary scholars address what John Guillory has called the discipline’s “legitimation crisis.”[7] But in what follows, I want to approach this question in a different fashion, focusing less on preoccupations internal to the discipline of literary studies and more on the relation between left criticism and its historical situation. If we approach the question in this way, then what we begin to see is not only that the problematics of Jameson’s most influential works were closely and self-consciously entangled with the period of the collapse or defeat of actually existing socialism, the ascendancy of global neoliberalism under US hegemony, and the retreat of the left throughout the Western world — roughly, the period from 1980 to 2008 — but also that the limits of his central problematics have been increasingly revealed in our post-crisis, post-neoliberal, and post-postmodern period, despite his own prolific efforts to keep up with it.[8]

How so? Here, it is striking to note that some of the most engaging and well-informed expressions of dissatisfaction with Jameson in recent years have foregrounded questions of value, albeit in different senses of the term. Two recent tendencies have done so in a particularly explicit way, and these will therefore be my primary focus in what follows. The first tendency, although it may not yet constitute a tendency in the full sense of the term, is represented by Joseph North’s call for a break with the dominant “historicist/contextualist” paradigm in literary studies — a ­paradigm of which he takes Jameson to be emblematic — and his related call for a revival of “criticism” and “aesthetic education.”[9] To be sure, North frames his polemic in terms of the long history of Anglophone literary studies, a history that is characterized by a periodically shifting balance between what he calls, in accordance with convention, “scholarship” and “criticism.” But his argument is also a clear and direct response to broader developments outside the academy in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, including, most importantly, the rise of social and political movements that have challenged neoliberalism from the right and left, and that have made it seem possible for the left not only to diagnose the problems of postmodernity but also to pursue treatments of one kind or another. These developments include not just the rise of populist, techno-feudal, and neo-fascist movements on the right, and not just the chorus of calls for democratic socialism (or social democracy) on the left, but also the emergence of what North describes as “the new resistance movements” of the long post-crisis conjuncture: Occupy Wall Street, the Movement of Squares, the Indignados, 15-M, Syriza, Black Lives Matter, and so on.[10] In response to this post-neoliberal interregnum, and fully aware of the steadily rising fortunes of the far right, North has argued for a renewed project of left criticism that would contribute to a broader project of cultural intervention primarily by encouraging literary and cultural critics not just to focus on the “diagnostic” or “evidentiary” value of literary texts (à la Jameson), but to exploit their “instrumental value” too, as tools for refashioning personal and collective sensibilities in an emancipatory way.[11]

Meanwhile, the second tendency has used the concept of value in a different sense. It has not been primarily interested in what we might call the political use value of literary and cultural texts, as North and others have been, but rather in the theory of value in Marx and in its application to the contemporary economic, political, and cultural scene. In many cases this tendency has also framed its project as a response — a similarly complex and ambivalent response — to Jameson. It is well represented in a recent volume edited by Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon, titled After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (2022), and its participants have argued for renewed attention to the fundamentals of Marxian economics and value theory, shifting focus, at least to some extent, from questions of superstructure to questions of the base.[12] Indeed, its participants have used Marx’s value theory not only to understand the ongoing subsumption, mediation, and marginalization of literature and literary criticism in our post-crisis present — to some extent working within the same problematic as Jameson — but also to rethink the fundamental dynamics of our crisis-prone capitalist system more generally, sometimes going so far as to suggest that the stabilizing functions of “culture” and “ideology” within that system have been overstated by the tradition of Western Marxism that Jameson both synthesized and embodied. Where one new tendency tries to rectify the balance of theory and practice, then, the other rectifies the balance of culture and political economy, even if only to return again, in a new and more sobering way, to questions of culture.

One way to think about both tendencies is as relatively independent efforts to redress deficits in Jameson and in Western Marxism as it developed in the neoliberal period — deficits of political practice and economic theory. In a different register, these deficits might also be described as limits to his mode of historicism and limits to the cultural turn in Marxist theory more generally, which Jameson himself theorized, historicized, and abetted.[13] Both of these deficits were explicitly noted not long after the crisis of 2008 by Benjamin Kunkel, who, in an otherwise enthusiastic tribute to Jameson, observed that there was something increasingly problematic about the “combination of hypertrophied theory and atrophied praxis” in his work, along with the “relative neglect of strictly economic questions” both in Jameson and in Western Marxism generally.[14] This was a not glib dismissal. Rather, it was an attempt to reckon with the fact that, in the neoliberal period, Marxism had held ground in departments of literary and cultural analysis while losing ground on the more important terrain of economics, strategy, and politics. And it was an attempt to confront the fact that, even if Marxists like Jameson had developed an ambitious practice of historicist interpretation under these inauspicious conditions, their work lacked a connection with what Jameson himself once called “a new and effective practical politics for the era of globalization.”[15] The simple reason for this lack was that no such politics existed.

In the years since Kunkel published this essay, these deficits in Jameson and in Western Marxism more generally have been the subject of direct and indirect debate, as the neoliberal consensus has given way to protest, polarization, and new forms of political practice outside of the academy (for better and for worse), and as the premises of “high theory” and “the cultural turn” have been questioned, criticized, or abandoned by many on the left, often in favor of more hard-headed forms of social-scientific, political-economic, and value-theoretical analysis.[16] Given this situation, we might say that both tendencies have tried not so much to answer the problems that Jameson produced as to produce new problems, while also reformulating some of the longstanding concerns of Marxism — theory and practice, base and superstructure — in light of changing conditions. But what, ultimately, should we make of the new problems that they have attempted to produce or, at least, the old problems that they have attempted to reformulate in a new way? Can the programs of criticism that they propose be reconciled, or do they suggest divergent paths for left literary studies? And is “the future of the problem,” as Jameson said, still “the problem of the future,” or has the future already arrived?

ii. the limits of historicism

To begin with, let us consider the charge that Jameson’s form of Marxism reflected a rupture of theory and practice that was to some extent characteristic of Western Marxism more broadly. Of course, the impression that Jameson’s highly theoretical, highly Hegelianized form of Marxism belonged too much to the realm of theory and was therefore debilitatingly disconnected from political practice has marked reactions to it for decades. One thinks, for example, of Richard Rorty’s pragmatic criticisms of Jameson and the so-called cultural left in the 1990s,[17] not to mention Edward Said’s simultaneously admiring and impatient remarks about Jameson, whose theoretically ambitious but politically inert work he took to be symptomatic of the insularity of literary studies after its turn toward “theory.”[18] But in Literary Criticism (2017), North makes the case in a more sustained, polemical, and timely way, treating Jameson as an emblematic figure both for the discipline of literary studies since the early 1980s and for the left in an era of defeat. Although North emphasizes that his treatment of Jameson does not do justice to the full range and complexity of his work, his argument deserves attention here for at least two reasons: first, because it explicitly ties methodological questions about Jameson’s historicism to the broader and more important question of political practice; and second, because it foregrounds the closely related problem of aesthetic value.

North develops his critique of Jameson within the context of “synoptic” history of literary studies, so it may be useful to summarize that history in order to engage with his critique.[19] According to North, the discipline of literary studies has been divided from its inception between “scholars” and “critics,” and the balance between them has tended to track broader developments in the history of capitalism. More specifically, according to North, the “critical revolution” of the 1920s that in many ways founded the modern discipline of literary studies represented a left-liberal attempt to break with contemporary modes of philology and historical scholarship, particularly by orienting the study of literature in a more decidedly secular, humanist, and interventionist direction. This critical project — developed by figures like I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis — defined one wing of the discipline for the period lasting roughly from 1914 to 1945, a period of political volatility and liberal crisis. But then, in the postwar period of Keynesianism and mass education, lasting roughly from 1945 to the 1970s, the American New Critics — John Crowe Ransom, William K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks — coopted the central method of close reading and took it in an increasingly conservative and idealist direction, even as they maintained an uneasy settlement with scholars in the discipline. Sometime around 1980, however, and in a quiet denouement to the theory boom of the late 1960s and 1970s, the scholars effectively won the dispute. The result was a depoliticizing “scholarly turn” that, even though it was initially inspired by Marxists like Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and Franco Moretti, ultimately secured the dominance of what North calls the “historicist/contextualist” paradigm.[20]

Alerting readers to the cunning of history, North draws attention to the fact that Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981) appeared both at the dawn of this new paradigm and at the beginning of the neoliberal era. This fact alone already begins to help us see that Jameson’s untimely defense of Marxist historicism represented, at best, a “pyrrhic” victory for the left.[21] As North argues, it may have seemed like a progressive advance over both post-structuralism and residual forms of midcentury criticism, but it was ultimately part of a broader retreat of the left in the neoliberal era, an era in which, as Susan Watkins remarked as late as 2010, the main question was still whether “a left intellectual project” could “hope to thrive in the absence of a political movement.”[22] For North, registering the eruption of social movements around the world just a year later, from Occupy to the Arab Spring, Jameson’s emphasis on diagnosis rather than treatment — and his related attempt to dissolve questions of value by adopting the standpoint of history — seems like an obstacle to imagining, articulating, and institutionalizing a radical, interventionist program of criticism. But according to North, such a program is precisely what is needed today, as long as there is still some hope of a left-wing counter-hegemonic movement developing outside of the academy and offering an alternative to neoliberalism, as well as to the far-right and center-left blocs that have been vying to replace it since the mid-2010s.[23]

In effect, then, North’s critique of Jameson constitutes an attempt to produce a new problem — or at least to revive an old problem under new historical circumstances: How can a revamped project of literary and cultural criticism contribute to political practice in our post-neoliberal era, and what conception of aesthetic value ought to inform it? Of course, the line of argument leading him to formulate this problem provokes many questions of its own, including, most urgently, the question of whether or not there are still grounds for expecting what North calls, at the very end of his book, a “larger forward movement” of the left both within and beyond the academy.[24] But one question that deserves special attention here is whether Jameson’s central problematic has actually produced the limit that North believes it has produced. We can reformulate that limit as follows: In Jameson’s work, historicism not only reflected an inevitable rupture of theory and practice in the era of neoliberal ascendancy, but also conceptually prevented their reunification in our post-neoliberal period. And it did so primarily by annulling questions about the instrumental value of the aesthetic, while also sidelining questions of moral and political judgment in order to focus primarily on historical explanation.[25] The result has been, somewhat ironically, a tacit depoliticization of literary studies and, more generally, a depoliticization of Western-Marxist cultural theory. Therefore, as long as our post-neoliberal interregnum persists, and as long as there is still some hope for the left, a new kind of materialist aesthetics is necessary as a supplement to historicism — and it is necessary not just in order to address the legitimation crisis of literary studies.[26]

Is this correct? Does what Jameson once called his own “absolute historicism,”[27] in other words, really produce a limit beyond which it is no longer productive, requiring a new theory and practice of aesthetic education oriented toward radical political change in the present? North presents a plausible case, to be sure, and it might even be fortified with some more recent and seemingly unrepentant remarks from Jameson himself, in which he openly admits that “what is lost” when we adopt the standpoint of history — a dialectical “third position” beyond the standpoint of the writer and the standpoint of the critic — “is to be sure judgment itself and what is loosely called value.”[28] Yet there is more to Jameson’s historicism than North acknowledges. And it is important to underscore this fact even if one ultimately agrees that we should pay more attention than Jameson did to theoretical questions about the instrumental value of the aesthetic, as well as to practical questions about how an institutionalized program of aesthetic education might contribute, however modestly, to political action. For the relationship between Jameson’s historicism and political practice is more complicated than North permits, especially when he asserts that, for Jameson, the goal of literary scholarship is ultimately “the production of accurate knowledge about our cultural history and present cultural situation,” and that this “strictly academic endeavor” may guide but can never be a part of “political praxis.”[29]

Consider, for example, how Jameson’s historicism both reframes and revolves around the problem of practice, whether he is talking about the past, the present, or the future. This was aptly registered in an early response to Jameson’s The Political Unconscious by Hayden White, who observed that Jameson’s historicism represented one of the few remaining attempts to redeem the visionary, romantic,[30] and practical dimensions of the Marxist philosophy of history, instead of allowing it to wither into yet another methodological option for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. What differentiated Jameson’s historicism from these more scholarly and positivistic alternatives, White suggested, was an implicit faith in what White called “narratological causality”:

As I understand him, Jameson goes so far as to conceive of narrative as a mode of consciousness that renders possible a kind of action specifically historical in nature. To Althusser’s three kinds of causality operative in history Jameson adds a fourth which might be called narratological causality. This would be a mode of causality that consists in a seizing of a past in such a way as to make of the present a fulfillment of the former’s promise rather than merely an effect of some prior (mechanistic, expressive, or structural) cause.[31]

This insightful reading helps to complicate or even undermine North’s claim that Jameson’s historicism was a positivistic, scholarly, or merely academic enterprise. Rather, it was explicitly intended to be a mode of symbolic action, which, by way of something like this principle of narratological causality, would engender, reinforce, or sustain a broader anti-capitalist political practice. But this is not to say that White defended Jameson. For White, Jameson’s historicism left open a much larger, more fundamental question: If narrative itself, as a form of “symbolic action,” might have this kind of narratological causality, then how, ultimately, should one choose one’s narrative?

To this question, Jameson had already argued that the Marxist philosophy of history remained the best candidate because it constituted an “untranscendable horizon.”[32] Marxism provided the dialectical resources for historicizing and synthesizing not only distinct and complementary critical theories, but also antagonistic and anti-Marxist ones, assigning each one of them a local and potentially transient role within a self-fulfilling metanarrative of emancipation. According to Jameson, that metanarrative was, as Marx himself had suggested in a famous passage from the third volume of Capital, “the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity.”[33] But if, in making this argument, Jameson himself seemed to inhabit what we might call the antinomy of the agent and the spectator, encouraging us to regard even our own present actions from the standpoint of an imagined future in which they would ultimately seem not free but necessary (“History is therefore the experience of Necessity”), White reasserted the primacy of the agent.[34] “In the end,” he claimed, Jameson “must leave it to individual judgment to decide whether the Marxist master narrative of world history is the best story that can be told about it.”[35]

One might take this remark as a critique of Jameson, a critique that draws attention to the groundlessness of his assertion that Marxism is the great master narrative.[36] And to some extent that is how White intended it, not because he disagreed with the idea that historical narratives always reflect some prior, prefigurative choice, but because he shared the postmodern concern that all grand narratives as such — Marxist or otherwise — have outgrown their usefulness.[37] But one might also take White’s observation about the underlying impulse of Jameson’s work — and its Sartrean underpinnings — as evidence of the close but complicated connection between historicism and political practice. It may be true that, as North suggests, historicism always risks becoming a depoliticized mode of retrospection, including, paradoxically, retrospection on the present. But, as White suggests, one’s choice of historical narrative is a thoroughly existential and political choice, which one makes at least in part because one thinks it might constitute an imaginative (or ideological) framework for individual and collective action of an emancipatory kind. In fact, we might say that existential choice and historicism reciprocally inform each other: There is no choice for Marxism without a sense of history as a field of possibilities, and there is no narrative of history as a struggle for emancipation without some prior existential choice that is, in its own right, an act of political commitment.[38]

But if rereading Jameson in this way helps us to correct North’s misreading, it does not ultimately address North’s major concern. For even if we redescribe Jameson’s historicism as an expression of some more fundamental existential choice and political commitment, while also insisting that choices and commitments of this kind presuppose some even more fundamental sense of historical possibility and are ultimately constrained by the experience of history-as-necessity, we still do not get much closer to what North wants. For what North wants is a more concrete, systematic account of how people in and around literary and cultural studies might practically contribute to “the cultivation of sensibility, as an active intervention in the broader culture; an attempt to make use of aesthetic texts, aesthetic experiences, aesthetic instances, to help us to transform our habits of value.”[39] But by rereading Jameson more attentively, we can begin to see that his version of historicism was not merely intended to inspire accurate scholarship about the past, and not merely to underpin materialist diagnoses of thwarted collective longing in the present. It was also intended to revive and reinvent the kind of mobilizing master narrative without which it would presumably be impossible to project and pursue a desirable post-capitalist future; and, implicitly, it provided a way of perceiving the aesthetic value of particular texts that can help us to sustain, revise, or expand our sense of that ongoing, unfinished narrative.[40] In that way, however abstract or merely diagnostic his work may have sometimes seemed, historicism retained an intimate connection both with the perception of aesthetic value and with political practice.

But if Jameson’s historicism as a hermeneutic practice retained some connection with revolutionary political practice at the level of theory, it did not retain a connection with any such political practice at the level of practice itself, due primarily to the depoliticized character of postmodernity as Jameson described it. Indeed, in a period defined by the defeat of both social-democratic and revolutionary movements and by the triumph of neoliberalism on a global scale, Jameson’s practice of historicist interpretation could only gesture at the absence of the revolutionary praxis it was meant to serve. Needless to say, this was not a problem that could be solved in theory alone, and Jameson was aware of this seemingly unresolvable impasse. He signaled this awareness in almost everything he wrote — in his more “scholarly” writings about the deep past, in his writings about utopianism and the future, and, most importantly, in his reflections on the predicament of Marxism and critical theory in the present. In these different types of works, Jameson continued to understand his historicism as a politically oriented symbolic act, rather than as a mere exercise in scholarship. Yet he repeatedly took stock of the seemingly completed process of historical defeat that had made Marxist politics in particular and left-wing politics more generally seem like a distant hope.

The clearest evidence of this tension is The Poetics of Social From, Jameson’s unfinished magnum opus. Unparalleled in its sweep and ambition, this project included Allegory and Ideology (2019), Antinomies of Realism (2013), A Singular Modernity (2003)/The Modernist Papers (2007), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), and Archaeologies of the Future (2006). It was also to meant to include a volume entitled Categories of the Narrative-Historical, but Jameson did not live long enough to finish it. Moving from Homer to science-fictional visions of our postcapitalist future, this project was arguably Jameson’s attempt to produce what in The Political Unconscious he had called “a single great collective story.”[41] As Bruce Robbins has observed, the point of this undertaking was not merely to demonstrate that a comprehensive and coherent story of this kind could be told; rather, it was “to construct a usable past meant to serve a coalition of the future.”[42] But the absence of such a coalition and the openness of that future meant that Jameson’s “single great collective story” — such as it was — could only be told in a paradoxical, self-reflexive, and ultimately unfinished way, gesturing both at the unknowability of the distant past[43] and at what he once called “those new forms of collective thinking and collective culture which lie beyond the boundaries of our own world.”[44] In that sense, one might say that his “single great collective story” attempted to construct a usable past for a coalition of the future, but with the awareness that it could not do much to bring about that coalition or that future — or even to narrate a single, coherent story — in the absence of a significant political movement. In the meantime, it was the absence of such a movement that justified not so much the “retreat” into historicism as the revival of utopianism, a narrative form that paradoxically did more than any other form to help us confront our inability to imagine alternative futures. As Jameson said in 2005, in the sixth and final volume, “utopia thus now better expresses our relationship to a genuinely political future than any current program of action, where we are for the moment only at the stage of massive protests and demonstrations, without any conception of how a globalized transformation might then proceed.”[45]

A little more than a decade later, it was this sense of living “in the meantime” that moved North to criticize historicism and utopianism alike as somehow incapable of helping us to articulate a more useful account of aesthetic value and of participating more directly in political practice in the present.[46] By now, it should be clear that North misrepresented the politics of Jameson’s historicism and that, whether or not Jameson himself acknowledged it, his mode of historicist interpretation has always been a vital resource for articulating the aesthetic value of particular texts — including, for example, the value of utopian texts that furnish us with a fuller sense of historical possibility at a time of foreclosed futures.[47] But nevertheless, North’s objections are hard to dismiss entirely. For they register important changes in the political climate that Jameson’s excessively broad scheme of periodization — i.e., modernity/postmodernity — was unable to accommodate, and they suggest a way of moving beyond an impasse that Jameson himself repeatedly acknowledged but saw no way to address.

“You can’t just have a Marxist idea,” Jameson noted in his lectures on postwar French theory. “There has to be a practice attached to it. If there isn’t, then you are already in revisionism and idealism.”[48] What to do, then, when theory and practice are detached, as Jameson himself seemed to think they were during the period in which he established himself as the preeminent Marxist critic? Jameson’s answer to this question had the virtue of honesty: “I myself think there is nothing to be done, except to be aware of it.”[49] For Jameson, given this impasse, it seems that the problem was how one might continue “rattling the bars”[50] of postmodernity without regressing to revisionism or idealism, and without allowing an essentially “provisional theory” like Marxism either to fade away or to harden into a reified philosophy.[51] For North, in contrast, the problem is whether some segment of literary studies might reconstitute itself as a part of a resurgent form of left-wing political practice in conjunction with forces beyond the academy.[52] The prospects of this happening are dimmer today than they were when North published his book, given both the assault on universities from the right and the attempt to quell this assault with a policy of depoliticization. But if that policy of depoliticization fails, and if some attempt to replace neoliberalism with a different style of politics resumes, then perhaps the problem North produced via his critique of Jameson will seem more pressing, and perhaps it will inspire new accounts of the political value of aesthetic education.

iii. the limits of the cultural turn

From one side, then, the postcrisis political environment inspired various attempts to redress the gap between historicist diagnosis and cultural intervention in Jameson and in Western Marxism more broadly, and North arguably offered the most coherent attempt to do so in the domain of literary studies, even if so far nothing like the project of radical aesthetic education that he envisioned has come to fruition. Meanwhile, from a different side, the same postcrisis environment has inspired various attempts to rethink Western Marxism’s emphasis on culture itself, along with the relationship between culture and more fundamental determinants of political economy. These have taken different forms, only sometimes rising to the level of explicit polemic. One might think, for example, of the widespread revival of interest in the economic theories of Marx himself, often via commentators like David Harvey and Michael Heinrich, and now via the new English translation of Capital.[53] Or one might think of the return to explicitly economic questions within the narrower world of Frankfurt School critical theory.[54] Or, even more to the point, one might think of the more sweeping polemic against “the cultural turn” by Vivek Chibber, who tells a parallel but ultimately quite different story from North’s, in which the retreat of the left after the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s resulted not in a turn from cultural intervention to cultural analysis, but in a counterproductive fixation on culture itself.[55]

With this discursive atmosphere in mind, it should come as no surprise that, in their introduction to the 2022 volume After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century, Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon observe that “the sense of a crisis-ridden present has helped fuel a renaissance of Marxist economic, political, and social theory,” but that “these crises have not led to reactivation of Marxist literary study.”[56] From this gap, many questions follow, including, as Lye and Nealon note, questions about the “radically reduced expectations” of theoretical and political work in English departments that already fear declining enrollment, delegitimation, and disinvestment.[57] But, looking beyond the discipline, more fundamental questions are these: Was Western Marxism’s focus on cultural questions exposed as a distraction and, as Kunkel suggested, a liability after the crisis of 2008, requiring a shift of attention to more fundamental questions of economics, politics, and strategy? If so, then what role, if any, should literary and cultural critics aspire to play in an interdisciplinary project of the left in the future?

Here, both as historical background and as analytical counterpoint, it is helpful to recall a similar debate from the 1970s and 1980s, a crucial point of transition in all of the periodizing schemes we have considered so far. At that time, both Jameson himself and Perry Anderson first began to reconstruct and to argue about the past and future of “Western Marxism,” a tradition whose contours were still in the process of being established.[58] Indeed, following Jameson in Marxism and Form (1971), Anderson argued in Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) for the existence of a distinctive and relatively unified tradition of Marxist thought in the parts of the world where, between 1920 and 1960, the left had been in retreat: Italy, Germany, and France. Both Jameson and Anderson, of course, extolled the virtues of this tradition as a source of theoretical innovation. But, more critically than Jameson, Anderson argued that it had been hobbled by a separation from practice, resulting in a latent pessimism, a fixation on questions of epistemology and method, and an overemphasis on culture and aesthetics.[59] With the eruption of mass movements in 1968, he surmised, a reunification of theory and practice might finally be possible, leading intellectuals on the left back to the original terrain of historical materialism: economics, politics, and strategy. This would spell the death of Western Marxism as a tradition, and as it declined, a new mass politics would begin to evolve in dialectical relation with more concrete forms of economic, political, and strategic theory.

But this is not what happened. And it is important to ask not only what happened instead, but also how what happened instead called into question the assumptions that Anderson made at the time and that others have been tempted to make since. Three outcomes in particular deserve emphasis. First, as Anderson himself noted in the lectures that became In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983), “the reunification of Marxist theory and popular practice in a mass revolutionary movement signally failed to materialize.”[60] Instead, the late 1970s proved to be the dawn of the neoliberal era, coinciding with a retreat from historical materialism in certain spheres of theory, most notably through the influence of post-structuralist currents in France. Second, there was indeed a return to the terrain of political economy in other spheres of theory, signaled, according to Anderson, by the publication of studies like Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972; translated in 1975), Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), and Michel Aglietta’s Theory of Capitalist Regulation (1976; translated in 1979). But this revival of Marxist political economy in the West did not go hand in hand with renewed political practice, as Anderson even more matter-of-factly observed two decades later, when, in the same breath, he commended the exemplary economic analyses of Anglo-American scholars like Robert Brenner and Robin Blackburn and acknowledged that “no collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon.”[61] Third and finally, from the early 1980s onwards, the tradition of Western-Marxist cultural theory was both synthesized and renovated for the era of postmodernism by Fredric Jameson himself, proving that Anderson had sounded its death knell too soon.[62] In fact, in the early 1990s, Jameson revived the figure of Western Marxism who seemed to many like the very embodiment of the faults that Anderson had identified in 1976, from pessimism and obscurantism to theoreticism and a vaguely hostile attitude toward the national, racial, and social liberation movements of the sixties. For it was none other than Theodor W. Adorno whom Jameson reclaimed as a prophet of the “total system” that was coming into being in the age of full-blown postmodernity, neoliberal globalization, and “the end of history.”[63] This may have constituted an act of theoretical intransigence, rescuing Adorno’s “late Marxism” from postmodern dilution. But its context, as Jameson averred, was a global process of political retreat.

How does this history bear on the present? And as we watch another cycle of crisis, protest, and reconfiguration unfold, to what extent is the same pattern repeating itself? There are no exact parallels, but there are echoes and influences. To some extent, North’s critique of Jameson echoes Anderson’s earlier critique of the Western-Marxist rupture with practice, with the most salient difference being that North has called for a revival of cultural intervention in the spirit of I.A. Richards and Raymond Williams, rather than a shift of attention from culture to political economy. Meanwhile, a postcrisis shift of attention from culture to political economy seems to have occurred anyway, leaving other literary critics and scholars on the left feeling like laggards. That, at any rate, is what Lye and Nealon suggest; it is telling that, in their attempt to set the scene for a reactivation of Marxist literary studies, they, too, invoke Jameson as a foil — but for different reasons.

According to Lye and Nealon, Jameson was the most “probing and synthetic” Marxist critic for an era that seemed to be defined by a process of “all-subsuming accumulation.”[64] In that situation, Adorno and the master motif of “commodification” seemed increasingly salient.[65] But today, they argue, neither all-subsuming accumulation nor the Western-Marxist problematic of commodification seem quite as relevant. In contrast, our new situation “calls for a theoretical vocabulary that imagines capitalist accumulation not only in terms of its ability to reproduce the working class, or to subsume social relations, but also in terms of the capitalist imperative to overcome a tendency toward diminished profits, which has produced both the deindustrialization of the global North and the slumification of the South.”[66] So, as this attempt to formulate a new problematic already suggests, their argument calls on literary critics and scholars to pay more attention to the arguments and modes of economic analysis that were to a considerable extent born out of the experience of the 1960s and out of what Anderson described as the ensuing return to political economy, such as Robert Brenner’s account of the “long downturn” and Giovanni Arrighi’s attempt to situate this downturn within a longer timeframe of hegemonic cycles. Their argument also urges literary critics and scholars to rethink, in a skeptical spirit, the presumptions of the post-1960s “cultural turn,” given the fact that, as they soberingly remark, “the current return to Marx [after 2008] gives no primacy to cultural revolution and thus no special epistemological privilege to the literary and cultural critic.”[67]

Now, for North, this argument might ultimately seem like a call to continue working in a loosely Jamesonian mode of historicist/contextualist analysis, while drawing on better, more rigorous, and more up-to-date scholarship from the social sciences — moving, for example, from Mandel’s “late capitalism” to Brenner’s “long downturn.” And to some extent, that is indeed what it amounts to. Neither Lye and Nealon nor the other contributors to After Marx provide much indication that they think a different, more interventionist form of criticism would be either desirable or viable in the post-2008 English department, given their common doubts about “literature’s socially progressive potentials”[68] and their relatively dire depictions of what one might call the adjunctification-cum-depoliticization of the humanities.[69] But still, the volume indicates several important shifts or breaks with Jameson, which might be seen simultaneously as efforts to produce new solutions to the Jamesonian problematic and as more ambitious attempts to produce a new problematic.

Two bodies of work deserve note here. First, there have been several important attempts to redefine the “cultural dominant” (or the “dominant style”) of our post-postmodern moment, and these have often been framed by more recent economic histories and theories of contemporary capitalism. After all, even Jameson conceded in 2016 that “postmodernism is over, if you understand postmodernism in a narrow way, because art has certainly changed in many respects since the 80s.”[70] The result has been a range of attempts to revise or update his analysis by describing, for example, what one might call processes of intensification (from “postmodernism” to “capitalist realism”),[71] inversion (from “mediation” to “immediacy”),[72] and regression or renovation (from the “de-differentiation” of value spheres to a reassertion of something like modernist “autonomy”).[73] Meanwhile, as the volume edited by Lye and Nealon makes abundantly clear, there have also been more local attempts to explain how contemporary cultural production reflects on and in some cases resists an economic situation defined not by linearly progressive “all-subsuming accumulation” and “commodification,”[74] but by declining profitability, debt, surplus populations, riots, and the incorporation of workers and artists themselves into the precarious spheres of gig work, tip work, and service work.[75]

Second, and somewhat relatedly, there have also been attempts to rethink the functions of literature, culture, and ideology more generally within this post-crisis landscape. For Jameson, of course, this was always a complicated topic, not least because “postmodernism” itself represented a further complication of the relationship between “base” and “superstructure.” For Jameson, in addition to subsuming nature, the unconscious, and the Third World into the global system of capital, the age of postmodernity had in some sense further closed the gap between base and superstructure, such that culture itself had increasingly become, as Jameson memorably put it, “what cleaves almost too close to the skin of the economic to be stripped off and inspected in its own right.”[76] One sign of this convergence was the “aestheticization” of reality, a process that has underpinned more recent studies of everyday aesthetic judgments in the age of postmodernity.[77] Yet despite this complicated picture, and despite Jameson’s equally complicated sense of the relationship between cultural critique and the ideology of postmodernism itself, it would be hard to deny that, following earlier theorists in the tradition of Western Marxism, at least one sense of the term “ideology” in his work was something like the mystification of capitalism and of the Real. These help to produce “postmodern people” who, as such, may be able to affectively and aesthetically register the basic socioeconomic processes of their world, but tend to lack the capacity to represent or conceptualize them.[78]

In contrast, one thing that stands out about some recent works of Marxist criticism is the extent to which, relative to earlier studies in the tradition of Western Marxism, they tacitly downplay the problematic of ideology. In that way, they dovetail to some extent with Chibber’s more explicit polemic against the New Left, the Frankfurt School, and other movements within Western Marxism that, especially since the 1960s, have elevated the functional significance of ideology and the culture industry.[79] In 2017, for example, Annie McClanahan claimed to detect in contemporary American fiction a type of “post-crisis political subject” who was “more radical, less optimistic, [and] more knowing” than the postmodern or neoliberal subjects described by earlier theorists like Jameson and Lauren Berlant, whose notion of “cruel optimism,” McClanahan suggested, was already outdated when they formulated it in 2011.[80] But a subtler version of the same tendency might be observed in Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick (2022), one of the most notable and significant recent works of Marxist criticism in the lineage of Jameson. For Ngai, what we learn by studying everyday aesthetic judgments about “the gimmick” is “how ordinary people process capitalism.”[81] When ordinary people call an artwork or a commodity a “gimmick,” in other words, they are not only making a judgment of taste in the peculiar mode of subjective universality that Kant theorized in his third Critique. They are also registering — and, in Ngai’s view, they are correctly registering — the dynamics of time, labor, and value under capitalism, dynamics that were first explicitly theorized by Marx and that have been explained more recently by value-form theorists like Moishe Postone and Michael Heinrich.[82] This means that, to invoke North’s terms, her study of the gimmick does not really perform the work of diagnosis at all. Rather, it demonstrates that ordinary people already diagnose deficiencies of value all the time, simply through their everyday acts of aesthetic judgment.[83] Thus, despite her own creative appropriation here and elsewhere of Adorno and the Frankfurt School, Ngai’s argument implies that critics do not really need to diagnose the ideological distortions of late capitalism, since, implicitly at least, ordinary people “already know” how it works.[84] The gimmick as form may seem like the quintessential instance of capitalist mystification, but the gimmick as judgment reveals its secret.

These claims are all contestable. But if for the moment we suppose that they and some of the other claims we have just considered are valid, then a new question begins to arise — a question about the purpose of left-wing literary and cultural critique after Jameson. If postcrisis political subjects are already more radical, less optimistic, and more knowing than their postmodern predecessors; if ordinary people already implicitly know how capitalism works; if even the rationale for what North calls cultural diagnosis has been weakened, along with the institutional conditions for providing some sort of treatment; and if the current left gives no primacy to cultural revolution, then what, ultimately, is the purpose and ambition of left-wing literary and cultural critique today? This question is rarely raised in precisely this way, and perhaps it is not necessary to ask it — perhaps the left does not need a deeper political rationale to engage in the materialist analysis of contemporary culture, because such analyses have intrinsic value. But something like this question seems to haunt recent forms of Marxist and left-wing criticism, particularly when they attempt to go beyond the Jamesonian and Western-Marxist problematics. The dimly felt need to answer it may explain the temptation among some literary critics to become more and more like social scientists, sometimes by reviving an aspect of Marx that remains contentious even among radical economists — namely, his value theory.[85]

As After Marx demonstrates, the renewal of interest in value theory may constitute a promising and productive new problematic within Marxist criticism, drawing on largely untapped resources from critical theorists like Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Raya Dunayevskaya, and the proponents of the “new reading” of Marx (or the Neue Marx-Lektüre).[86] Perhaps, for example, it will help critics to replace the earlier and seemingly inadequate Western-Marxist vocabulary of ideology critique, reification, and commodification with a more supple vocabulary for talking about real abstraction, unemployment, the technical composition of capital, and the contradictory dynamics of accumulation, taking Marxist criticism on a trajectory not unlike that of Marx himself as he moved from The German Ideology to Capital. Perhaps it will also help them to address the vague but increasingly pronounced sense of irrelevance, marginality, belatedness, and redundancy that haunts the project of left-wing literary and cultural critique in our postcrisis, postneoliberal situation by demonstrating that, even if they cannot provide either demystifying diagnoses or practical treatments, humanists can at least make their own modest contributions to the critique of political economy. But this new tendency also has some potential drawbacks. First, it may risk dubious interdisciplinarity, as when literary critics not only revive Marx’s value theory but also invoke his notoriously controversial theory of “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,” despite the fact that this thesis has been rejected both by the most sophisticated proponents of the new reading of Marx[87] and by the major theorists of “the long downturn.”[88] Second, as I have already intimated, it may amount to a kind of temporary compensation for what even its proponents perceive as the waning cultural and political significance of literature and literary criticism. It may amount, in other words, to a kind of hardheaded retreat into the social sciences.

To weigh some of these risks, consider one of the more engaging and provocative contributions to After Marx. In “The Irreconcilable: Marx after Literature,” Joshua Clover argues that today capitalist value production is irreversibly waning, and that this makes it unlikely that a new global hegemon will emerge to replace the United States. Synthesizing György Lukács and Arrighi, he argues that accelerating value production in the context of previous hegemonic cycles — first in Britain, then in the United States — established the underlying conditions for the novel as an “orienting form” over the past two or three centuries (roughly, 1719–2020).[89] He suggests that, as value production wanes, we should expect a parallel waning of the novel itself, if not of literature more generally. One result of this, he argues, is that Marxist criticism will need to find something new to do in a posthegemonic, post-postmodern, and post-Jamesonian era: “We can of course keep peering at the novel for signs, metaphors, allegories of its own failure, the collocation once known as postmodernism. But there may be a limit to the number of times we can discover the impossibility of the reconciliation, and that impossibility’s material basis.”[90] One might argue that despite his hyperbolic title (“after Literature”), Clover is simply observing that the forms and functions of literature — along with the methods of interpretation that we have inherited from Jameson — will have to change as the material conditions of British hegemony, US hegemony, and postmodernity give way to a more turbulent world of declining profitability and multipolarity, if not of “capitalism’s end.”[91] But still, the argument should give us pause for several reasons.

First, Clover’s explanation of declining value production implicitly relies on a controversial yet largely undefended aspect of Marx’s value theory: his theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This requires further explanation, particularly to address how that theory can or cannot be reconciled with Brenner’s alternative account of declining profitability since the long downturn of the 1970s.[92] Second, his understanding of what it means for the novel to be an “orienting form” is underspecified, and he does little to differentiate between the diagnostic, aesthetic, and instrumental value of the novel. After all, even if the novel no longer serves as “privileged bearer of the problematic of our epoch,” couldn’t critics on the left still argue about the aesthetic and instrumental value of particular novels?[93] Would this, too, be retrograde, even if it were supported by a broader, parainstitutional project of cultural intervention of the kind that North envisions? Third, Clover leaves one with a clearer sense of what Marxist criticism should not do in our post-Jamesonian moment than of what it should do. If Marxist critics should no longer do what Jameson did, looking to the novel for allegories of its own failure to map the totality or historically reflexive intimations of a postcapitalist future, then what should they do instead? Is the purpose of Marxist criticism simply to explain the conditions of economic decline that have resulted in the death of the novel, disinterestedly contemplating what Juliana Spahr and Sarah Brouillette matter-of-factly call the “sequestration” of literature “into irrelevance”?[94] If so, perhaps that would not be so bad. But to this it would be tempting to reply: We can keep pronouncing the death of the novel and the inability of criticism to change the world, but there may be a limit to the number of times we can discover the impossibility of transformative literature and criticism, and that impossibility’s material basis.[95]

iv. conclusion: the problem of the future

But rather than focusing on the limitations of any single recent work of criticism, let me conclude by stepping back and observing that there seems to be a broad agreement among critics and scholars on the left about the fact that the central problematics of Jameson’s work from the neoliberal period have produced a certain limit beyond which they are no longer productive, even if Jameson still feels in some ways like an “untranscendable horizon” in his own right. For some, as we have seen, his work helped to sustain Marxism and to establish a paradigm of historicism that made most sense in a time of political defeat or depoliticization for both the social democratic and the revolutionary left, but the task now — assuming that there is still some hope for a broader movement beyond the academy — is to reestablish the connections between historicism and aesthetic education, diagnosis and treatment, cultural theory and political practice. For others, meanwhile, his work has seemed to reflect the “relative neglect of strictly economic questions” that has always compromised the tradition of Western Marxism, and what we more urgently need is to return to the terrain of political economy and value theory, a return that might continue to inform studies of the new cultural dominant but that should not overstate the stabilizing function of culture, the progressive potential of literature, or the primacy of cultural revolution.

To put it another way, one tendency has probed the limits of Jameson’s historicism and reopened the question of the political value of aesthetic education, while the other has probed the limits of the cultural turn more generally and redirected attention to properly economic questions about the long downturn, partly with the goal of developing more rigorous analyses of contemporary capitalism and its cultural symptoms and partly with the goal of redefining the aspirations of left-wing criticism in an era of declining relevance. Can these two tendencies be reconciled? Perhaps, but we should take stock both of the specific challenges confronting each and of the tensions between them. Even if someone were to articulate a viable materialist method of radical aesthetic education to complement Jameson’s historicism, as North envisions, the broader conditions for a movement of the left against both neoliberalism and the prevailing far right alternative seem to be lacking. Moreover, the conditions that Lye, Nealon, and others describe — from adjunctification and depoliticization to the sequestration of literature into ­irrelevance — are not auspicious for any style of political engagement that gives undue importance to the role of the literary, the aesthetic, the cultural, or the university.

Finally, even if these attempts to produce a new problem suggest how left literary studies might advance beyond the paradigm of Jamesonian historicism, we cannot ignore the central problem that Jameson himself formulated at the end of his lectures on postwar French thought: “The future of ‘the problem,’” he argued there, “is the problem of the future.”[96] For Jameson, of course, “the problem of the future” was none other than the problem of developing alternatives to capitalism, and it was arguably this central problem that lay behind most of the other well-known problems that he produced within the narrower domain of literary and cultural studies (e.g., cognitive mapping, metacommentary, allegorical interpretation, utopia, and so on). As Jameson’s chiasmus implies, he believed that we would only be able to move beyond this fundamental problem if the conditions of postmodernity changed. But if we take “postmodernity” to be something like a synonym for global capitalism, then that seems unlikely to happen any time soon. Of course, the neoliberal consensus has fractured, and the post–Cold War period of global neoliberalism under US hegemony has given way to something that increasingly resembles a new Cold War. But insofar as we still inhabit global capitalism, we have to admit that the relevant conditions have not fundamentally changed, and that Jameson’s abiding problem will therefore persist. In the meantime, perhaps Marxist and left-wing criticism can occupy not only the standpoint of history, contemplating the present in all its necessity, but also the standpoint of the agent, intervening in the present with the inevitably modest means of aesthetic education. Should this prove viable, it will require not only a rigorous analysis of how the pursuit of surplus value continues to shape our world but also an account of the political use value of literature and criticism, however limited they may ultimately be.

endnotes

1. For his early study, see Fredric Jameson, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). ↩

2. Fredric Jameson, The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, edited by Carson Welch (New York: Verso, 2024), 19. Here Jameson uses philosophy and theory interchangeably, although elsewhere he differentiates them. ↩

3. Jameson, The Years of Theory, 19. ↩

4. Ibid. ↩

5. Ibid., 449. ↩

6. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1–21. ↩

7. Michael W. Clune, A Defense of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 78, 185. On the “legitimation crisis” of literary studies, see John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). ↩

8. Notably, some of Jameson’s most important theoretical studies were written after the crisis of 2008. These include, for example, Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2010), Representing “Capital”: A Reading of Volume One (New York: Verso, 2014), and The Hegel Variations: On “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (New York: Verso, 2017), along with monographs on writers and theorists such as Benjamin, Brecht, and Chandler. ↩

9. Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Because of his attempt to repurpose terms like “criticism,” “aesthetic education,” “sensibility,” and “value,” North has been read by some as a left-liberal or conservative-liberal humanist who is proposing a straightforward revival of I.A. Richards and his program of “close reading.” But this is a misreading. North is clear that he does not dismiss historicism and cultural critique, that he thinks aesthetic education needs to be reconceived in a materialist mode, and that his sympathies lie with the radical left. A more constructive debate about his argument, which registers its political impulses and methodological commitments more accurately, can be found in the New Left Review. See, e.g., Francis Mulhern, “Critical Revolutions,” New Left Review 110 (March–April): 39–54; Lola Seaton, “The Ends of Criticism,” New Left Review 119 (Sept–Oct): 105–132; Patricia McManus, “Parsing the Personal: On the Project of Radical Aesthetic Education,” New Left Review 132 (Nov–Dec): 107–124; and Benjamin Kunkel, “Critic, Historicize Thyself!” New Left Review 136 (July–Aug): 83–97. ↩

10. North, Literary Criticism, 201. ↩

11. On the sense of value in Jameson, see North, Literary Criticism, 100–104. ↩

12. Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon, eds., After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022). ↩

13. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (New York: Verso, 2009).  ↩

14. Benjamin Kunkel, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis (New York: Verso, 2014), 72, 73. ↩

15. Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 (Jan–Feb): 36. ↩

16. For an example, see Vivek Chibber, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022). ↩

17. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). ↩

18. See, for example, Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 132–135. ↩

19. North, Literary Criticism, vii. ↩

20. Ibid., 56–80. ↩

21. Ibid., 211. ↩

22. Susan Watkins, “Shifting Sands,” New Left Review 61 (Jan–Feb 2010), 27. ↩

23. Of course, the status of neoliberalism since the crisis of 2008 has been a topic of considerable controversy, producing no consensus about how to describe our interregnum. For one notable attempt to capture this mobile situation, see, for example, Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond (New York: Verso, 2019). ↩

24. North, Literary Criticism, 212. ↩

25. Along similar lines, Terry Eagleton remarked in 2009: “Jameson’s work is too quick to substitute historical explanation for both moral and political judgment, as though the two were mutually exclusive.” See Eagleton, “Jameson and Form,” New Left Review 59 (Sept–Oct 2009): 135. Bruce Robbins makes a similar point, although he describes this as a point of ambivalence: “Jameson’s writing shows over and over again a dramatic ambivalence as to whether taking sides is politically necessary or, on the contrary, whether the impulse to take sides is an undialectical concession to a childishly unhistorical Kantian moralism.” See Bruce Robbins, Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), 177. ↩

26. In fact, the relationship between politicization and the discipline’s “legitimation crisis” remains somewhat ambiguous even in the writing of critics who analyze it at length. For example, Guillory tends to present the overstated political ambitions (or “fantasies”) of literary critics as a symptom of their marginality and as a residue of the discipline’s amateur past. Yet it is not clear whether he believes, along with the more conservative members of the discipline, that these ambitions have partly caused its legitimation crisis, requiring, as a partial solution, a wholesale retreat from all attempts to have some sort of political impact beyond the academy. For an instance of this ambiguity, see Guillory, Professing Criticism, 78. ↩

27. Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (New York: Verso, 2016), xiii. Jameson draws the idea from Gramsci. For a critique of this idea, see Eagleton, “Jameson and Form,” 135–137. ↩

28. Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (New York: Verso, 2020), Kindle edition, chap. 1. ↩

29. North, Literary Criticism, 102–103. ↩

30. Jameson himself had taken up the question of Marxism and “romance” in The Political Unconscious, partly as a response to White’s own earlier discussion of it. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 283. ↩

31. Hayden White, “Getting Out of History: Jameson’s Redemption of Narrative,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). ↩

32. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Routledge, 2002), x. ↩

33. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 3. ↩

34. Ibid., 87. ↩

35. White, “Getting Out of History,” 167. ↩

36. Jameson more or less acknowledges this point in his lectures on postwar French thought, where he describes “Gödel’s law of politics: there is no final foundation for these choices,” Jameson, The Years of Theory, 406. ↩

37. “It may well be that the decline of narrative reflects less a condition of decadence than sickness unto death with the stories that representatives of official culture are always invoking to justify the sacrifices and sufferings of the citizenry.” White, “Getting Out of History,” 167. ↩

38. This point requires a caveat. For Jameson, the choices are not limitless, since History imposes itself as an unavoidable limit. In other words, the historical narratives that we choose — and the actions they inspire — ultimately run up against History, understood here as some more fundamental, more constraining experience of necessity (or, as may be the case for the left in the period of postmodernity, of failure). As such, History eludes reification in the form of a finished narrative, and it can only be retrospectively registered through its effects. For Jameson, this seems to be one of the basic meanings of “historical materialism,” and his commitment to it clearly differentiates him from constructivists like White. For an early articulation of these and other salient differences, see Fredric Jameson, “Figural Relativism, or the Poetics of Historiography,” Diacritics 6, no. 1 (1976): 2–9. ↩

39. Joseph North, “Two Paragraphs in Raymond Williams,” New Left Review 116/117 (Mar–Jun 2019): 182. ↩

40. Jameson did not articulate “aesthetic value” in these terms, and sometimes, as we have seen, he flatly dismissed questions of “aesthetic value” in general. Nevertheless, he clearly treats some texts as having more than merely diagnostic value. Of certain works of postmodern allegory, for example, such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, he commented: “Postmodern allegory is comparable, rather, to a one-time event, which even the writers themselves cannot reproduce: a conjunction of factors, a favorable alignment of the stars and the planets not likely to occur again.” See Allegory and Ideology, “Literary: Allegoresis in Postmodernity.” One might also think of his essay on national allegory and third-world literature, where he states that his purpose is to “convey a sense of the interest and value of these clearly neglected literatures.” Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, “Political: National Allegory: Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” For a similar observation, focusing on Jameson’s account of the Hotel Bonaventure in Los Angeles, see Kunkel, “Critic, Historicize Thyself!,” 91–92. ↩

41. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 3. ↩

42. Robbins, Criticism and Politics, 188. See also Bruce Robbins, “Single? Great? Collective? On Allegory and Ideology,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 4 (2020): 789–98. ↩

43. This is a recurring idea in his posthumously published essay on Homer. While to some extent representing a broader, transhistorical story, it largely consists of an attempt “to subtract our own inevitable interpretive schemes from the process” of reading, not in order to “escape the ideological” altogether, but rather “to approach something like its zero degree.” See Fredric Jameson, “Agon: The Iliad,” New Left Review 149 (Sept–Oct 2024): 63, 68. Ironically, by constantly “countering projection,” Jameson actually comes quite close to modeling the form of critical judgment recently theorized by Michael Clune, who nevertheless tends to treat Jameson as an example of interdisciplinarity gone wrong and as a foil for his more disciplinarily constrained model of “close reading.” See Clune, A Defense of Judgment, 74. ↩

44. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, xi. ↩

45. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 232. ↩

46. North, Literary Criticism, 19. Here it is perhaps worth acknowledging Jameson’s own controversial foray into utopianism, written just one year before the publication of North’s book. See Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Slavoj Zizek (New York: Verso, 2016). ↩

47. For a similar argument, see Kunkel, “Critic, Historicize Thyself!,” 88–92. ↩

48. Jameson, The Years of Theory, 194. ↩

49. Ibid., 438. ↩

50. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 233. ↩

51. Jameson, The Theory Years, 438. ↩

52. North puts the point like this: “the role of the Marxist theorist of culture is, for [Jameson], a diagnostic one, and the actual treatment, if or when it comes, must take the form of political praxis guided by, but not itself a part of, the more strictly academic endeavor.” Literary Criticism, 103. ↩

53. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Paul Reitter, ed. Paul Reitter and Paul North (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024). ↩

54. See, for example, Robin Maialeh, Critical Theory and Economics: Philosophical Notes on Contemporary Inequality (New York: Routledge, 2023). ↩

55. Vivek Chibber, The Class Matrix, esp. 4–9. ↩

56. Lye and Nealon, “Introduction,” After Marx, 9. ↩

57. Ibid., 9. ↩

58. For the first use of the term, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). For another relevant study, which outlines the topography of Western Marxism, see Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). ↩

59. See Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (New York: Verso, 1989), 75–94. Despite these overt and sustained criticisms, Anderson’s book has recently been misremembered as a “manifesto” of Western Marxism. For this increasingly influential but mistaken view, see Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn, trans. Steven Colatrella, ed. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024). ↩

60. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (New York: Verso, 1983), E-pub edition e-book, “Prediction and Performance.” ↩

61. Perry Anderson, “Renewals,” New Left Review 1 (Jan–Feb 2000): 17. ↩

62. Anderson later wrote a largely celebratory essay about Jameson’s theory of postmodernism. See Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (New York: Verso, 1998). ↩

63. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: 2007), 1–12. ↩

64. Lye and Nealon, “Introduction,” After Marx, 8. ↩

65. Ibid. ↩

66. Ibid. ↩

67. Ibid., 9. ↩

68. Sarah Brouillette, “The Rise and Fall of the English-Language Literary Novel,” After Marx, 129. There are exceptions, of course. See, for example, Jasper Bernes, “Poetry and Revolution,” After Marx, 240–252. ↩

69. See, for example, Annie McClanahan, “Industry Culture,” After Marx, 205–206. For a similar point about adjunctification, presented as a critique of North, see also Anahid Nersessian, “For Love of Beauty?,” New Left Review 133/134 (Jan–Apr 2022): 195. ↩

70. Nico Baumbach, Damon R. Young, and Genevieve Yue, “Revisiting Postmodernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson,” Social Text 34, no. 2 (June 2016): 144. Jameson continued to believe, however, that we still inhabit the period of “postmodernity,” which for him was the third and as yet unsurpassed stage of capitalism. ↩

71. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Washington: Zero Books, 2009). ↩

72. Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2023). ↩

73. Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art Under Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). ↩

74. For a critique of “commodification,” see Leigh Claire La Berge, “There Is No ‘More Commodification’: Periodizing Capitalist Transformation,” After Marx, 86–100. ↩

75. For an essay that stresses surplus populations, see Mark Steven, “Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution,” After Marx, 55–70. For essays that explore the relationship between art, cultural theory, and service work, see Michael Shane Boyle, “In Service to Capital: Theater and Marxist Cultural Theory,” After Marx, 209–224, and Annie McClanahan, “Industry Culture: Labor and Technology in Marxist Critical Theory,” After Marx, 192–208. ↩

76. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1992), xv. ↩

77. Jameson, Postmodernism, x. On aesthetic judgment, see Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). ↩

78. Jameson, Postmodernism, xv. ↩

79. On the limits of ideology critique, see, for example, Chibber, The Class Matrix, 81–85. ↩

80. Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 195. See also Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). ↩

81. Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 5. ↩

82. Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 35. See, for example, the important passage in which Ngai contrasts the abandonment of labor in post-Marxist theory with the implicit persistence of these insights in the gimmick as both aesthetic judgment and capitalist form. The point, of course, is that everyday judgments hew closer to the truth than post-Marxist theory, because everyday judgments confirm the labor theory of value (or, as she and some other theorists prefer to say, “the value theory of labor”). ↩

83. See, for example, Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 140, 225, 228, 274, 286. ↩

84. Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 35. ↩

85. Marx’s value theory has of course been challenged by many mainstream or neoclassical economists, along with many analytical Marxists. For a recent study that explains these objections and also tries to salvage other parts of Marx’s economic thought, see Jamie Edwards and Brian Leiter, Marx (New York: Routledge, 2025), 97–149. For a critique of its use in literary studies that also targets Jameson, see, for example, Michael Clune, Writing Against Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 72–75. ↩

86. For a concise genealogy, see Amy De’Ath, “Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism,” After Marx, 230. See also Ingo Elbe, “Between Marx, Marxism, and Marxisms — Ways of Reading Marx’s Theory,” Viewpoint Magazine, October 21, 2013, https://viewpointmag.com/2013/10/21/between-marx-marxism-and-marxisms-ways-of-reading-marxs-theory. ↩

87. See, for example, Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s “Capital,” trans. Alexander Locascio (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 141–154. ↩

88. Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economics from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (New York: Verso, 2006), 14–15. ↩

89. Joshua Clover, “The Irreconcilable: Marx after Literature,” After Marx, 101, 104. ↩

90. Clover, “The Irreconcilable,” 113. ↩

91. Ibid. ↩

92. Clover moves quickly between Brenner and the proponents of Marx’s value theory, without noting tensions between them. See, for example, Clover, “The Irreconcilable,” 110. ↩

93. Clover, “The Irreconcilable,” 103. ↩

94. Ibid., 113; Sarah Brouillette, “The Rise and Fall of the English-Language Literary Novel Since World War II,” After Marx, 117. ↩

95. Brouillette makes her doubts about the transformative potential of literature more explicit: “You may have noticed the absence in this chapter of any sustained interpretation of select texts, nor have I treated literature in the way that remains common within my own profession: as a source of penetrating insight into our contemporary condition and a means of galvanizing progressive change. This was a deliberate choice, to emphasize instead some fundamental structuring dynamics of contemporary literary culture — dynamics that themselves counsel caution about literature’s socially progressive potentials.” Brouillette, “The Rise and Fall of the English-Language Literary Novel,” 129. ↩

96. Jameson, The Years of Theory, 449. ↩