Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?

Author(s): Fredric Jameson

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 2004), pp. 403-408
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004)
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403
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 tosupplant philosophy(andother 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, andit at once
excludes and forestalls a great deal of philosophical and systematic writing
organized around systems or intentions, meanings and criteria of truthand
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 denitions, 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 theoryas 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 tosay 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 recognizeddeconstructioninmy
description, and some will wish to associate Althusserianismwith 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-
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 armative posi-
tions, in other words, are awed and ideological because they reect our
own personal and class (and race and gender) standpoints.
It is a mistake to assimilate this viewof theory to relativismor skepticism
(leading fatally to nihilism and intellectual paralysis); on the contrary, the
struggle for the rectication of wording is a well-nigh interminable pro-
cess, which perpetually generates new problems. As for the overall contra-
diction of theoryhow to advance the argument without actually saying
anythingit has known a variety of solutions, which cant be enumerated
here. The single example of the neologismmay suce, the doomedattempt
to outwit the heavy baggage of actually existing language by way of post-
natural innovation. But theorys eternal enemy, reication, quickly absorbs
and neutralizes the attempt.
What we now have to register (Im slowly coming to the question of
theory today) is the way inwhichthis viewof thinkingandwritinggradually
annexes large areas of the traditional disciplines, that is to say, traditions in
which outmoded practices of representationbelief in the separation of
words and conceptsstill holds sway. I am describing the process of the
expansion of theory in gures of war and domination and imperialismbe-
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 dierent political valence). At any rate, what happens
during the period in which theory spreadsand the classical story is well
known: rst anthropology borrows its fundamental principles from lin-
guistics, thenliterary criticismdevelops the formers implications ina range
of new practices, which are adapted to psychoanalysis and the social sci-
ences, the law, other cultural disciplineswhat 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 dierent ones. What
is calledthe exhaustionof theory is generallylittle more thanthecompletion
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 ones disciplinary perspective. I do feel that it has a modernist
dynamic or telos, borrowed fromthat modernismin the arts that no longer
Fredri c J ameson 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).
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 condence that there always
will be something newto replace the various older reied or signedtheories
that have been absorbed into and domesticated by the theoretical canon.
Or is there such a thing as a theoretical canon? Is theoretical productionnot
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 rst moment in which the inner structurethe
inner gap or ssureof the concept as such is explored. This is the moment
often identied as structuralism, in which it becomes clear that concepts
are not autonomous but rather relationalboth internally and exter-
nallyand 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 momentsometimes called poststructuralismthis 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 undergroundbun-
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 dierent 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 specic, the individual, the singular, and even the virtual, while
a bad universalism hangs over everything like a doomsday cloud and gets
406 Fredric Jameson / Symptoms of/for Theory
identied with everything from the state to the commodity form, from re-
pressive sexual norms tothe identities of class analysis. This is thennot some
problemthat can be solved, not an opposition that canbe dialecticallytran-
scended, but rather a whole new theoretical coding system in which every-
thing that went before must nowbe recongured. Under the tutelarydeities
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 Schmitts friend and foe and nding its
ultimate gure in war. Or at least one should say that war is the ultimate
gure in which the political is revealed; because the latter is also a construc-
tion, a defamiliarization, and a rewriting, a simplication of concrete life
in the form of a new model, Im tempted to have recourse to Deleuzes
notion of diagrammatization (which he develops on the occasion of Fou-
cault). Yes, thinking politically means turningrepresentationintodiagrams,
making visible the vectors of force as they oppose and crisscross eachother,
rewriting reality as a graph of power centers, movements, and velocities.
Such diagrams are the last avatar of those visual aids that mesmerized the
rst 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 Marxismto mean the supersessionof 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 theoreticallyexist,
all the words I can nd for it are still the old-fashionedanddiscreditedones,
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
simplication 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, oers 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 drawback fromsuch openings; we still dont want tohear anythingabout
social class; and new theoretical fashions like Giorgio Agambens idea of
naked life are at once read as metaphysical or existential statements or at
worst enlisted to provebeing a kind of zero degreethat the collective
does not exist (instead of being grasped as the identication of a new col-
Critical Inquiry / Winter 2004 407
1. Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Exile (Minnesota, 2002),
p. xiii.
lective planet or quark). But it is not very satisfying to talk about elds 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 dierent 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 suce for a time even though the his-
torical reevaluation of this data remains as interesting a theoretical problem
as all postmodern historiography. Meanwhile there ourishes 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 andcultural studies inthe 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 dierently. 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 ones daily life but all the more present because
of it in ones daily thoughts, one couldhave asked: howis literarycriticism?
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 dierently, however, and todefend
the positionthat literary criticismis or shouldbe a theoretical kindof 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 symptomis oftenmisunderstoodas encouraging
a vulgar-sociological or content approach to works of art. I suppose that at
this point we could read all of Adornos 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.
Suce it to say that works of the past aord all kinds of uniquely aesthetic
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 ownthat blind spot of the present fromwhich
we are in many ways the farthest. What we tend to neglect, however, are the
utopian projections works of past and present alike oer 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 signicant literature ceases to be produced
or rather, putting it in a dierent way, when the center of gravity of some
putative system of the ne 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 specic 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 presidentsomething that might at best be at-
tributed to sheerest accident or national bad luck; they are part and parcel
of our system, andunderstanding cultural productiontodayis not theworst
way of trying to understand that system and the possibilities it may oer
for radical or even moderate change.