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We are cannibals, all: Fredric Jameson on colonialism and experience

Avram Alpert

Online publication date: 08 February 2010

To cite this Article Alpert, Avram(2010) 'We are cannibals, all: Fredric Jameson on colonialism and experience',

Postcolonial Studies, 13: 1, 91 105

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Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 91105, 2010

We are cannibals, all: Fredric Jameson

on colonialism and experience

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All third world texts are necessarily . . . national allegories.1 It was with this
sentence, published now more than twenty years ago, that Fredric Jameson
became, practically overnight, one of the most criticized figures in postcolonial
literary studies. The torrent of critiques started with Aijaz Ahmads now
equally famous response, and continued up through the late 1990s in Gayatri
Spivaks Critique of Postcolonial Reason. What gave Jameson the right, they
asked, to so generally theorize the Third World? What deep colonialist biases
permeated the text? And what was this strange insistence on nationalism
anyway?
Sometime in the past five years or so, however, the tone shifted. After over a
decade of diatribes, a series of qualified defences began to appear. They
claimed that Jamesons essay was more tongue-in-cheek than Ahmad or others
had allowed. Moreover, they suggested, the ideas of the essay might be accurate
and true*perhaps Third World writers really do write in the form of national
allegories. And perhaps, just as crucially, the national allegory itself was much
more complicated than nationalism, and did in fact offer a suggestive model for
literature the world over.2
It is difficult to engage the essay Third-World Literature in the Era of
Multinational Capitalism without going through these recriminations and
qualified defences that it has continued to provoke. These responses have
spoken to the heart of Jamesons essay and the political project surrounding. So
then it is not just difficult, indeed it is politically suspect, to avoid any of these
questions. I will suggest here, however, that it is worthwhile to at least bracket
this political question in order to ask if there was something else happening in
that essay, something just as important as its sweeping hypothesis or
theorization of the national allegory. Indeed, it will be my contention in this
essay that national allegory is in fact the superstructural term that relates to a
crucial substructural problem: the question of how we experience the world in
the present day and the methodology for shifting that form of experience. In
looking at this feature of Jamesons essay within the context of his other work, I
think we can better understand why his arguments still elicit both rancour and
esteem. As we shall see, his theory of experience is as rich and sophisticated as it
is fraught with colonial legacies.
In the original foray, critics attacked Jamesons colonialist bias and his
insistence on nationalism, while recent essays defending Jameson have gone
through his work on Wyndham Lewis to recover the notion of the national
ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/10/01009115 # 2010 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
DOI: 10.1080/13688790903490868

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allegory.3 This is, I think, insufficient, not only because national allegory is not
the only crucial term in the essay, but also because it fails to understand the
deep situatedness of the Third World essay within Jamesons entire oeuvre and
not just his work on Lewis. Moreover, the term experience, as Martin Jay has
persuasively shown, is absolutely central to intellectual life in the past 150
years.4 This is certainly evident, though rarely noticed, in Jamesons own work.
Indeed, the term experience plays a clear role in how Jameson frames the
argument of his now infamous essay. Recall that Jameson begins in his typical
critical fashion: to keep us on guard from our natural responses to texts. The
immediate response he sets out to critique is that the third-world novel will not
offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce.5 Jameson, intervening in contemporary debates about the canon, wants to suggest that if this is the case, it is not
so because Third World novels are inferior, but rather because First Worlders
and Third Worlders have two radically different sensibilities when it comes to
the novel.
Jameson then sees the crux of this split emanating from two different
experiences*for the Third World, this is having suffered the experience of
colonialism and imperialism.6 For the First World it is a different sort of
rupture in experience: We have been trained in a deep cultural conviction that
the lived experience of our private existences is somehow incommensurable
with the abstractions of economic science and political dynamics.7 Jameson
sees this as a dialectical relationship*the First World loses its sense of a total
experience once it enters imperial capitalism (the means of production are no
longer immediately experienceable in the metropole), and the Third World,
receiving the displaced mode of production from the First, is forced to reckon
with the effects of politics in its most intimate spaces.8 This, then, is his
explanation for why we do not appreciate Third World texts the way we
appreciate Joyce or Proust: it is not because of some defect in the text, but
rather because we cannot grasp this other type of experience.
This is the purportedly progressive part of Jamesons essay*the idea that we
must suspend our given reactions and seek to understand the experiences of
others with fresh eyes. Critics of the essay had nothing against this notion per se,
but many remained sceptical of the conclusions about this other experience
which Jameson came to. Foremost among them, of course, was Aijaz Ahmad in
Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory. Ahmad
picked apart Jamesons essay point by point, from the notion of a cognitive
aesthetics to Jamesons betrayal of Marxism through his nationalist sentiments
to questioning Jamesons knowledge of Third World texts in general. Most
important for my argument, Ahmad also questions Jamesons use of the term
experience.
Ahmad first recognizes the position that I have outlined above*namely, the
idea that First World texts are marked by the sundering of the social and the
psychic, a sundering which is supposedly sutured in the Third World text. He
rightly concludes that this binary opposition is absurd, and is only possible if
one defines the First and Third Worlds as having singular identity[ies] of
experience,9 an idea which he spends most of the essay debunking.
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Ahmad continues this line of critique by looking at a passage on Lukacs from

Marxism and Form where Jameson traces the split between private and public
to the rise of industrial capitalism. Ahmad sees this as the background
to Jamesons writings on experience in the Third World essay: Clearly, then,
what was once theorised as a difference between the pre-industrial and
the industrialised societies (the unity of the public and the private in one, the
separation of the two in the other) is now transposed as a difference between the
first and third worlds.10 Ahmads point that the Third World is a romanticized
site just like the pre-industrial world was is well taken. The idea that Jameson
has simply transposed this romanticism, however, does not quite work. After
all, it is precisely because of the changes in the structure of industrial capitalism
that the Third World has the experience it does. In other words, Ahmad lets us
think that perhaps Jameson believes the Third World is in the same condition as
the pre-industrial, but this is far from the case. Instead, Jameson has a rather
complex notion of the relationship between the public and private in
contemporary writing, a relationship which he says is mediated by a particular
style of allegory.
In the Third World essay, Jameson makes it explicit that his notion of
allegory has nothing to do with the traditional conception of an allegory as a
symbolic equivalence between fiction and reality. Rather, he writes, the
allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and
heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the
homogenous representation of the symbol.11 In other words, a literary
allegory of class relations can no longer simply map the relationship between
the public and the private in a one-to-one manner; rather it must use
increasingly variegated narrative strategies, such as those which Jameson
recognizes in the work of Lu Xun and Sembene Ousmane.
This idea of a complex relationship between allegory and experience has a
particular muse for Jameson, another thinker who took the notion of
experience very seriously: Walter Benjamin.12 Jamesons ideas here are
particularly influenced by Benjamins essay The Storyteller, which he calls
Benjamins masterpiece in Marxism and Form.13 Later, in the 1984 afterword
to his first work, Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Jameson notes that the basic
propositions of this study turned around the question of narrative . . . the
possibility of storytelling, and the kinds of experience*social and existential*
structurally available in a given social formation.14 Jameson thus laments that
he had limited access at the time of writing Sartre to thinkers like Adorno and
Benjamin. After all, this relationship of storytelling to experience was a
primary theme of Benjamins own work.
This classic essay of Benjamin on storytelling became a significant
precursor for Jamesons own reading of Third World literature. Recall that
Benjamin had framed his remarks on storytelling by writing of the loss of
positive experience in the modern era: For never [before] has experience been
contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare,
economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare,
moral experience by those in power.15
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Benjamin opposed this world of fractured experience to the world of Leskov,

the storyteller: whereas the contemporary world had these fragmented
experiences, the lost world of the storyteller was whole. Thus Benjamin likened
the storyteller to the craftsman as someone who could assemble the parts of his
life into a whole: his very task [is] to fashion the raw material of experience, his
own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way . . . His gift is the
ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to tell his entire life.16 We see
here the relationship of the part to the whole, the organicity that Ahmad notes.
But although Benjamin suggested that the work of storytelling could redeem
such loss, he still insisted that the loss of storytelling itself was a symptom of the
era.
Since this was the case, Benjamins solution, as we know from his essays on
Baudelaire and cinema, was not a simple return to the lost art of storytelling.
He sought, rather, to revolutionize the forms of experience as best he could.
Relating the part to the whole was the capacity of the storyteller, and it is
something we should remember, but it is not something we need necessarily
embody. As Benjamin puts it elsewhere, Commemoration is the complement
to experience . . . commemoration [comes] from the dead occurrences of the
past which are euphemistically known as experience.17 Experience of the part
whole relation, then, for Benjamin, is dead. We can remember it, we can
periodically seize it as he says in the Theses, but the modern world will
demand much more elaborate strategies than Leskovs. One such strategy,
which Jameson has been foremost in bringing our attention to, is that of
allegory. Summarizing Benjamin, he writes, Allegory is . . . the privileged mode
of our own life in time, a clumsy deciphering of meaning from moment to
moment, the painful attempt to restore a continuity to heterogeneous,
disconnected instants.18 Once again, then, we can see that the national
allegory is not about a return to an older form of experience, but the invention
of a new form of writing to deal specifically with the loss of such a form.
There is one more salient point here, which is that Benjamin has himself told
a story*the story of the disintegration of storytelling (the part) in relation to
the rise of the novel, World War I, industrial capitalism, and so forth (the
whole). Notice, then, the strange form he has used*this new form of criticism
which attempts to show its own conditions of impossibility. What Benjamin
seeks thus is not a return, but to make possible what he calls counsel: After all,
counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the
continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would
first have to be able to tell the story.19 Benjamin offers such an allegory for his
times, and one redemptive way to read Jameson is to say that he is doing
something similar in the Third World essay. His story is, like any story, a sort of
fiction (all . . . necessarily . . .), but it is a fiction directed to the specific end of
counsel. To the question of whether or not Jameson has accurately described
Third World literature is thus added another: whether or not the story he has
told about it will provide a form of counsel.20
In Marxism and Form, Jameson argues that there is a particular style of
writing that will give good counsel, a style which he names dialectical
criticism. Cultural critique for Jameson becomes first and foremost . . . a
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form . . . [I]t always involves the jumping of a spark between two poles, the
coming into contact of two unequal terms, of two apparently unrelated forms
of being.21 For Jameson these two poles are the individual work and the social
world in which the work takes place*what he calls the ontological ground.22
We can see here the essential form of the Third World essay: it shows how two
forms of writing which appear at first unrelated are intimately connected
through the ontological ground of changes in the structure of capitalism
which result in imperialism. In other words, the First World experience is
trapped in private matters because its real material conditions lie elsewhere,
while Third World experience is necessarily political because it must react to
this imposition of material conditions from the First World. It is this relation
that the essay seeks to give a voice to, and, in so doing, to tell us a story that
might help re-orient such an uneven development.
The topic of the place of experience and this style of criticism within the
Third World essay is further underscored by the presence of one of Jamesons
preferred methods of dialectical criticism*what he will later come to call
cognitive mapping. This is a term he will not use until 1983, but a sense of it
appears as early as Marxism and Form with the notion of the allegorical map.
Echoing Engels and speaking of Zolas Pot-Bouille, where class is located across
an apartment from top to bottom, Jameson writes that this novel shows the
allegorical structure of class consciousness through this map or chart of
society as a whole.23 Jameson goes on to contrast this allegorical structure of
European realism with the essential impossibility of such a form in writing
from the United States. He notes that the value of works like Zolas is that they
show what we are now lacking.24 This type of writing has become impossible
in the US, he argues, because, if there is something unique in the American
class situation, it has to do with a kind of overflowing of national limits in such
a way that the older national experience, a microcosm in which the truth of the
individual coincides with the socio-economic structure, is no longer available.25 In short, then, we could say that the task of the critic is to unveil these
structures of experience and re-articulate the national situation within its
international frame.
He puts this point in a more general theoretical frame in the concluding
chapter of Marxism and Form which I quote at length because it gets to the
heart of Jamesons theory of experience: Thus the process of criticism is not so
much an interpretation of content as it is a revealing of it, a laying bare, a
restoration of the original message, the original experience, beneath the
distortions of the various kinds of censorship that have been at work upon
it.26 And, a few pages later, he continues:
The terms in which the socio-economic dimension of experience are described
are however by no means limited to those of the work . . . Such authenticity
is . . . therefore that which restores to us some fitful contact with genuine
experience, and the form which such contact takes is at one with the historical
possibilities of the socio-economic organisation itself.27

The terms of particular interest for Jamesons theory of experience here are
genuine or original experience, fitful contact and historical possibilities.
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Given Jamesons use of authenticity in this passage, the terms appearance

after the Sartre chapter in Marxism and Form, and Jamesons general proclivity
for working with Sartre,28 I want to suggest that these are Sartrean terms, or
that, at the very least, they can be productively read through the later Sartre of
Search for a Method and Jamesons own favourite, Critique of Dialectical
Reason.29
Again, it is important not to mistake genuine or original experience for pure
experience*it is not some organic moment of seeing the whole and the part in
perfect alignment. Rather, it is fitful and it is delimited by possibility. Later in
his career, Sartre attempted to bridge his existentialist version of phenomenology and Marxism, and the question of possibility forms an important part of
that bridge. One important intervention of phenomenology in the history of
philosophy was to move from the question, What is possible, to the rearticulation of being, of is, as a series of possibilities. Consider, for example,
the classical philosophical object, the table. Plato would have said that there
was a Form of a table behind all instances of tables; Aristotle would have made
a list of the attributes of the various possible tables; while Husserl suggested
that we can know the table as a phenomenon whose eidos we could understand
through the eidetic variation, that is, a process of varying the table in our
imagination to such an extent that we arrived at something which was no longer
a table, and, at that point of difference, understood what a table was.
Part of understanding a table as a phenomenon was to understand not the
conditions of possibility of making a table (an essence in the world, a set of
attributes), but rather what conditions a table made possible which would no
longer be possible after the variation. For example, a table makes it possible for
me to sit as I am as I compose this essay. A table as a phenomenon, in other
words, creates a certain set of possibilities for placing, eating, and so forth.30
Now in Husserls phenomenology it remained possible to recollect all these
possibilities into a coherent picture of the essence of the phenomenon through
the mental faculty to provide what he called re-tensions and pro-tensions.
Husserl understood the limits of possibility, but his interest was in the ability of
the mind, not the circumstances surrounding the table. Heidegger famously
disagreed and thereby extended the analysis into the historical realm.
Epistemologically, Heidegger held, it was not possible to hold on to all those
images of a phenomenon. One only got snippets, and one made ones choices
from these snippets.31 Heidegger thus introduced historicity into the idea of
possibility. It was not just about tables anymore, but an entire life which could
be understood as a project of working through the various possibilities given at
a specific time: As long as it is, Dasein always has understood itself and always
will understand itself in terms of possibilities.32
It is finally in Sartres hands that these notions are given the political register
that can be used to interpret the passage from Jamesons early work. For Sartre,
it is not just a question of working through possibilities, but of actively trying to
change them. Thus Sartre writes,
To say what man is is also to say what he can be . . . The material conditions of
his existence circumscribe the field of his possibilities . . . It is by transcending the

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given toward the field of possibles and by realising one possibility from among
all the others that the individual objectifies himself and contributes to making
history.33

One is what one is only through the possibilities for experience that one can
make out of the given situation.
But Jameson shrewdly notes that the situation is more complicated than it
appears. A vulgar Marxist expression of Sartres formula, for instance, would
be that what we experience are the possibilities available to us in a given
economic situation. What makes this a vulgar formulation is that it allows
one to say, for example, I had that job, now a migrant worker does. I therefore
have been wronged by way of a historical possibility, and need to wage
struggle against migration. Such an interpretation is what Jameson called
above the censorship of the original experience. Censorship is here to be
understood not solely as stopping someone from seeing something, but rather
stopping them from seeing something by giving them something else to see.
Here, the possibility to experience the totality (the networks of global capital
that cause downsizing, migration and the need for surplus labour) is occluded
by a pre-given local interpretation of the experience. Jamesons genius as a critic
is to see this situation of censorship and the need to return, through a dialectical
critique, to the possibilities of experiencing the totality. As he puts it so well in
the closing lines of Marxism and Form: It therefore falls to literary criticism
to continue to compare the inside and the outside, existence and history, to
continue to pass judgment on the abstract quality of life in the present, and to
keep alive the idea of a concrete future.34
This Sartrean line of a concrete future, a concrete project for individuals to
aspire to, provides us with a very distinct form of politics: the attempt to change
the present and thus to re-route what becomes possible in the future. However,
this Sartrean idea is explicitly absent from Third-World Literature in the Era of
Multinational Capitalism. Something funny has happened between 1971 and
1986, where Jameson is no longer telling a story about changing possibilities,
but rather about a situation in which possibilities have been blocked off (all . . .
necessarily). It seems that a shift occurs in Jamesons work then, a shift we can
best locate in the years leading up to the Third World essay*particularly two
writings from 1982, Progress Versus Utopia; Or, Can we Imagine the Future?
and Postmodernism and Consumer Society.35
In general in the 1980s, Jameson engages more and more with postmodern
culture in film, architecture and urbanism, and, as he does so, his pessimism
about the present grows as well. Such pessimism is certainly detectable in
Marxism and Form as he writes about the essential impossibility of American
writing, but it is really only with the writings on postmodernism that this
move away from changing historical possibilities is complete. Jameson, as
we shall see, comes to take on a different view of time, a spatialized one,
which allows not for projection into the future, but only the disruption of the
present by the future.36
The title of Jamesons essay on the meaning of science fiction gets at the crux
of the difference here. Progress implies the movement of projection, the ability
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to go through the present toward something else. Utopia, as Jameson uses it,
means that because we cannot project out from the present, we must instead
invent a future completely outside of what we have in order to disrupt the
current system. Sartrean progress disappears, and we are left instead with
Benjamins vision:

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The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.37

To the question, can we imagine the future, Jameson thus pointedly states no,
and that what science fiction shows is the opposite of what we commonly
assume: Its deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to
dramatise our incapacity to imagine the future and to thereby succeed by
failure since it forms a contemplation of our own absolute limits.38 Not
unimportantly, these remarks once again occur around a discussion of
experience. What this contemplation of our limits is said to do is to
defamiliarise and restructure our experience of our own present. In other
words, to employ elaborate strategies of indirection [which] are therefore
necessary if we are somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to
experience, for the first and real time, this present, which is after all all we
have.39 It is not literatures task to talk about what is going on here and how to
change it*this is already censored and impossible; rather it can only enable us
to see (with the aid of dialectical criticism), by interrupting the present.
We can thus notice here the essential gesture of the Third World essay, i.e. a
new sense of our own possibilities for experience through complicated
narrative strategies that come from the outside.40 Indeed, just as in Marxism
and Form and the Third World essay, these strategies cannot come from the
United States but rather only the Soviet Union.41 This Second World SF
presents First World readers with a non-commodity-saturated atmosphere, so
that the capitalist world which characterises our own daily experience, is
suddenly and unexpectedly stilled.42 Jameson is no doubt right to suggest, as
with the Third World essay, that experiencing cultures outside ones own can
re-orient how one experiences everyday life. At the same time, the recurrent
theme (in Marxism and Form with regard to Europe, in Progress versus
Utopia with regard to the Second World, and in Third-World Literature with
regard to the Third World) that Americans are no longer able to experience the
world and that their sense of things must therefore be redeemed from the
izek understands, Colonization
outside remains problematic. As even Slavoj Z
was never simply the imposition of Western values, the assimilation of the
Oriental and other Others to the European Sameness; it was always also the
search for the lost spiritual innocence of OUR OWN civilization.43 Jameson is
not searching out some spiritual experience, but rather a political one, and he is
dangerously displacing that experience on to everywhere other than the United
States. Experience, in other words, is not a set of possibilities historically
available, it is not even the Sartrean future more or less blocked off,44 rather it
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is essentially impossible for someone within the United States to experience

the world other than in its fragmented, distorted form. What we can detect,
then, is a shift from a temporal concept of experience to a spatialized one. The
reason for this shift is explained in the Postmodernism essay.
Jamesons well known essay on postmodernism forms a double link at this
conjuncture. First, it further diagnoses the current state of US (First World)
experience and its fragmentations. Second, it adds a theoretical tool, cognitive
mapping, to Jamesons general notion of dialectical criticism. It is the idea of
cognitive mapping, combined with a Benjaminian analysis of storytelling,
which sets the stage for the Third World essay.
In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson
pioneered a way of understanding what constituted postmodernism across a
number of fields and genres. He added to our understanding of the present a
series of terms, including the depthlessness of the image, the waning of affect,
the loss of historicity and the rise of pastiche. He also related these changes
once again to the topic of experience, stating that postmodernism is the
enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning
representations of our own current experience.45 What we experience, in other
words, is an inability to understand or conceptualize that very experience. This
is a painfully paralysing situation, which Jameson sums up in a well known
sentence:
If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and
re-tensions across the temporal manifold, and to organize its past and future into
coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural
productions of such a subject could result in anything but heaps of fragments
and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the
aleatory.46

Once again, I think this sentence only becomes fully comprehensible when read
in light of Jamesons own intellectual history, and in particular what appears to
be a reference to both Husserl and Henri Bergson. The terms re-tension and
pro-tension, as we saw above, are Husserlian in origin. But the term tension is
also a key Bergsonian notion from Matter and Memory, where he uses it to
define the ability of the mind to synthesize moments in time, and, through this
synthesis, consciousness [can] retain the past better and better, so as to
organise it with the present in a newer and richer decision.47 For Bergson,
fuller experiences of lifes vitality occurred specifically because of the ability of
the mind to extend itself across the temporal manifold.
But Jameson, going beyond Lefebvre,48 not only re-orients the discussion
toward space, but suggests here that politics can only occur at the level of space.
As he said in an interview about the Postmodernism essay, That notion of
deep time, of Bergsonian time, seems radically irrelevant to our contemporary experience, which is one of a perpetual spatial present. Our theoretical
categories also tend to become spatial.49 With the Husserlian/Bergsonian
capacity to retain (re-tensions) the past, also goes the Sartrean ability to
project (pro-tensions) into the future. Jamesons theoretical category of
experience then itself becomes spatialized.50
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What Jameson offers then, so to speak, is a spatial fix:51a model of political

culture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial
issues as its fundamental organizing concern. I will therefore provisionally
define the aesthetic of such new (and hypothetical) cultural forms as an
aesthetic of cognitive mapping.52 To define this form of cognitive mapping,
Jameson relies on Kevin Lynchs understanding of the contemporary city as a
space where the individual cannot map in her mind her relationship to a larger
space. What cognitive maps should do, then, is to make possible that impossible
link between the subject and the overwhelming city space.53
In concluding his essay, Jameson moves this aesthetic from the city to the
globe, arguing that all future forms of representation will have to deal with
globalization and invent radically new forms*such as the national allegory*
in order to do it justice.54 Moreover, he argues, cognitive mapping cannot take
as its focal point the city or even the nation, but must deal with the world space
of global capitalism. Only in this context can any truly political art be formed*
although the very possibility of such an art he still questions. Once again, we see
the themes that have recurred throughout Jamesons career*the necessity of
working within the given historical and economic conditions, the need in the
present to create radically new forms of both art and critique in order to come
to terms with these conditions, and, finally, the importance of relating the part
to the whole within these new forms. What has changed here is the form of the
projection. The individual no longer can project his or her future in the Sartrean
sense; rather what is called for is a sheer Herculean effort to imagine the world
in its totality.
Around the same time, Jameson published an essay entitled Rimbaud and
the Spatial Text, which begins as an attempt to understand Rimbauds A
Season in Hell as just such a Herculean effort. Jameson argues that Rimbauds
rather absurd statements about Africans, Asians, and all others be read as the
necessary absurdity deployed by the author in order to grasp the totality in a
modern, imperial world.55 Jamesons own essay can be read in similar terms*
as his own absurd meanderings utilized in order to grasp the totality. The essay
can be seen, in other words, as a kind of fictional map with the impossible task
to trace the entire world.
Jamesons attempt to create that map perhaps tells us something beyond this
about the nature of his project to grasp the totality, just as Rimbauds A Season
in Hell did for Jameson. So, if absurd ramblings were modern poetrys answer to
the question of totality, what is Jamesons answer for postmodern times? He
gave a potential answer in 1993 when, on the occasion of Jacques Derridas
lecture on the Specters of Marx at Duke University, Jameson conducted an
interview with two Swedish writers which has just been published in English.56
In that interview he makes a striking remark. He begins, But were also
working out of certain kinds of national situations, and the most important
thing for us as first world intellectuals is to be open to the experience of both
intellectuals and artists and people generally in other parts of the world. Up to
this point, we can see once again the merit of how Jameson poses the question
of experience. But then he adds, We have to cannibalize their possibilities of
experience in the absence of our own, in much the same way as Paul Simon has
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to cannibalize South African music.57 He then goes on to say this is a way of

making the international intellectual movement on the Left that Derrida
speaks of in Specters.
This statement, that we have to cannibalize their possibilities of experience,
is striking in many ways, but should make sense in the context of Jamesons
intellectual history*the need to redeem the US experience from the outside,
the idea that experiences are encased within historical possibilities, and finally
that we are in a desperate situation where we lack any historical possibilities.
But to understand the comment on cannibalizing, there is a bit more to say.
First, this possibility was perhaps on Jamesons mind in the context of
Derrida since the latter had begun writing and lecturing on the topic in the
late 1980s and early 1990s.58 In an interview around this time, Derrida stated
that it is
no longer [a question] of knowing if it is good to eat the other or if the other is
good to eat, nor of knowing which other. One eats him regardless and lets
oneself be eaten by him . . . Since one must eat in any case and since it is and
tastes good to eat, [the question becomes...] how for goodness sake should one
eat well[?]59

Derrida suggests we must learn to eat without violence, by learning and

giving to eat, learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat.60 I imagine that the idea that
cannibalization is something we always already do, and so it is something
that we must learn to negotiate rather than forbid, was on Jamesons mind
when he made his own remark in the interview.
But there is also another moment when cannibals come up in Jamesons
work, and that is in his reading of Lu Xuns Diary of a Madman, in the essay
on Third World literature. In Lu Xuns story, Jameson tells us, the paranoid
narrator comes to feel that all those around him are cannibals. Jameson
explicates this scene as follows:
For it should be clear that the cannibalism literally apprehended by the sufferer
in the attitudes and bearing of his family and neighbours is at one and the same
time being attributed by Lu Xun himself to Chinese society as a whole . . . Lu
Xuns proposition is that the people of this great maimed and retarded,
disintegrating China of the late and post-imperial period, his fellow citizens,
are literally cannibals: in their desperation, disguised and indeed intensified by
the most traditional forms and procedures of Chinese culture, they must devour
one another ruthlessly to stay alive.61

What then are we doing when we cannibalize possibilities of experience? Does

Jameson not represent the United Sates as being in the same position, in this
globalized world which we could easily describe as great maimed and retarded,
disintegrating [United States] of the late and post-imperial period? Is he not,
then, simply cannibalizing others in such a space because he too must do so
ruthlessly [in order] to stay alive, to redeem the US experience in a frightening
political moment?
We can see then in this interview both what critics of Jameson have so hated
about his original essay and what his recent defenders have found to be more
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laudatory. He expresses here, on the one hand, the need to remain open to new
experiences and to question ones own experiential position before critiquing
that of others. On the other hand, he states quite bluntly that the experience he
is most interested in is one of the First World needing and consuming the
experiences of others for its own ends. This is not good counsel.
When Ahmad read Jamesons essay, he got the feeling that according to
Jameson, Politically, we [Third Worlders] are Calibans all. If Ahmad looks at
Jameson and sees himself reflected back as a Caliban, then perhaps it is because
of the distorted mirror through which they look at each other, since Jameson, as
it were, looks at Ahmad and sees himself reflected back as a cannibal.
I have tried in this essay to remove some of the distortions from the mirror
between Jameson, Ahmad and others by considering both the positive and
negative potentials of Jamesons text. I hope, at the very least, to have shown
that the debate that has raged around the text vis-a`-vis the question of
nationalism needs also to reckon with this theme of experience, which I have
suggested is in fact the crucial term of Jamesons essay. Moreover, to fully
understand what Jameson is doing with the term experience, I have tried to
chart briefly the intellectual history of experience within his work, and how its
ultimate spatialized form laid the theoretical framework for his conjectures
about Third World literature.
We might then summarize Jamesons trajectory as follows. He begins with a
Sartrean and generally phenomenological theory of experience which looks at
how the ability of the subject to project future possibilities for experiences is
politically distributed in a society. He adds to this a sophisticated Marxist
notion of the original experience of the economic totality. Following his
studies in postmodernism, he then pulls out a pessimistic line from Sartre,
combined with the even more doubtful thoughts of Benjamin, to suggest that
this temporal view of experience cannot withstand the representational
moment of postmodernism, where abilities to project and imagine better
futures are lost.
Jameson thus turns to a spatialized view of experience. Here experience itself
is said to be defined by certain economic geographies and therefore can only be
changed by re-orienting these economic spaces through dialectical critique and
cognitive mapping. It is in this theoretical climate that Jameson considers the
narrative strategies available for such re-orientation, and deems the national
allegory (produced by the experience of colonialism) as the genre par
excellence. He makes this claim explicitly as a first-worlder, concerned about
the disappearing experience of even allegorical totality in his geographic space.
His essay becomes a self-described cannibalistic exercise in reviving the
possibilities of experience for the contemporary American scene.62
It would be beyond the scope of the present essay to now make a sustained
argument for or against this theory of experience, although I think it is clear
that the type of colonization of experience Jameson ultimately comes to
espouse should be discarded and rethought. This is certainly not to say,
however, that Jamesons work itself should simply be abnegated. Rather I have
tried here to re-orient the discussion of his work and its utility toward a
renewed discussion on the terms of experience, and to suggest that how we
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consider and perform postcolonial literary criticism, if not global relations

more generally, might want to follow Jameson in at least coming to terms
with this topic, even if only to disagree. With more in-depth investigations of
global experience we might even see more of the totality*more of how the
geographic, temporal, and economic limitations on contemporary experience
are being shaped and unevenly distributed the world over.

Notes
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F Jameson, Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, Social Text, 16, 1986, p 69.
For critiques see A Ahmad, Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory, Social
Text, 17, 1987, pp 325; M Sprinker, The National Question: Said, Ahmad, Jameson, Public Culture, 6,
1993, pp 329 (Sprinker, it should be noted, was not entirely opposed to Jamesons formulations); G
Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999, pp 109110. For defences see I Buchanan, National Allegory Today: A
Return to Jameson, and I Szeman, Whos Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism,
Globalization, in C Irr and I Buchanan (eds), On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization,
Albany: SUNY Press, 2005; N Lazarus, Fredric Jameson on Third-World Literature: A Qualified
Defence, in D Kellner and S Homer (eds), Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004.
F Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979. Though the term seems in fact to originate in Jameson, Marxism and Form:
Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971,
pp 398400.
M Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005. This was also the case with Bergsonism and phenomenology,
neither of which Jay discusses.
Jameson, Third-World Literature, p 65.
Jameson, Third-World Literature, p 67.
Jameson, Third-World Literature, p 69.
I explore this process in more depth below. Jameson gives a succinct explanation in Rimbaud and the
Spatial Text, in Tak-Wai Wong (ed), Rewriting Literary History, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 1984, pp 6688. I refer to the reprinted version in The Modernist Papers, New York: Verso, 2007,
pp 239240.
Ahmad, Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness, p 10.
Ahmad, Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness, p 14.
Jameson Third-World Literature, p 73.
For a broad overview of Benjamins work on experience, see chapter 7 in Jay, Songs of Experience.
. . . which is perhaps his masterpiece, p 77.
F Jameson, Sartre: The Origins of a Style, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, p 206.
W Benjamin, Illuminations, New York: Schocken, 1968, p 84.
Benjamin, Illuminations, p 108.
Cited in Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 73.
Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 72.
Benjamin, Illuminations, p 86.
This question does not replace the other one, of course, for it is not so easy as to say there are no facts
and nothing but stories. Since facts are not entirely self-evident, however, their categorization in
narrative remains a focal political point.
Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 4.
Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 4.
Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 399.
Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 399. Something crucial here is Jamesons insistence that this difference
has profound value for Americans. Indeed, throughout his oeuvre, Jameson looks abroad to find
solutions to what he sees as the increasing stagnation on the US cultural scene. He will repeat this point
in his response to Ahmad, writing, The essay was intended as an intervention into a first-world

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literary and critical situation, in which it seemed important to me to stress the loss of certain literary
functions and intellectual commitments in the contemporary American scene. It seemed useful to
dramatize that loss by showing the constitutive presence of those things . . . in other parts of the world.
Jameson, A Brief Response, Social Text, 17, 1987, p 26.
Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 399. It is strange for Jameson to say that this is unique to America, and
he no doubt knows that the situation is otherwise. He himself says as much in Modernism and
Imperialism while writing about Joyce: What is determined by the colonial system is now a rather
different kind of meaning loss . . . for colonialism means that a significant structural segment of the
economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside of the daily life
and existential experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own life experience and
life world*very different from that of the imperial power*remain unknown and unimaginable for the
subjects of the imperial power, whatever social class they may belong to. Jameson, Modernism and
Imperialism, in Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,
1990, pp 5051.
Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 404.
Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 407.
On the importance of starting with Sartre to understand Jamesons work, see S Homer, Sartrean
Origins, in Kellner and Homer, Jameson: A Critical Reader.
I refer to the two works together since they appear as such in French.
Husserl worked around these ideas a lot, but had little interest in the history of philosophy per se. His
thoughts in this area are thus primarily worked out around his writings on the body. Merleau-Ponty was
among the first to write about this, in The Spatiality and Motility of Ones Body, in The
Phenomenology of Perception, C Smith (trans), New York: Routledge, 2002, although he does very
little to acknowledge Husserl. More direct readings of these questions appear in J Dodd, Idealism and
Corporeity: An Essay on the Problem of the Body in Husserls Phenomenology, New York: Springer, 1997;
and J N Mohanty, Husserl on Possibility, Husserl Studies, 1, 1984, pp 1329.
For a straightforward introduction to this disagreement, see M Inwood, Heidegger, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997, pp 2728.
M Heidegger, Being and Time, New York: Harper & Row, 1962, 145. If I have spent so long with these
phenomenological questions, it not just because of their importance for Sartre, but also for Jameson,
who always had a certain Marxist reading of even Heidegger. See F Jameson, Jameson on Jameson:
Conversations on Cultural Marxism, I Buchanan (ed), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007,
pp 2930 and 175176.
J P Sartre, Search for a Method, H E Barnes (trans), New York: Vintage, 1968, p 93.
Jameson, Marxism and Form, p 416.
This latter was delivered as a talk at the Whitney Museum in 1982, and published in its most well-known
form as Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, New Left Review, 146, JulyAugust,
1984, pp 5292. I will cite from the NLR version.
Even when, in texts like Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson writes about time, he will thus write about
it in a spatialized form. Jameson there will take the concept of disruption from Habermass reading of
Benjamin, and use it as a way to suggest a spatial time to disrupt the present: the future as disruption
(Beunruhigung) of the present, and as a radical and systemic break with even the predicted and
colonized future which is simply a prolongation of our capitalist present. Jameson, Archaeologies of the
Future, New York: Verso, 2005, p 228. The present is homogeneous time and thus does not move
through duration, but only continuation. The future, as such, is dislodged from a continuity with the
present, and presented instead as a spatial location that will come to the present to disrupt it.
Benjamin, Illuminations, p 258. We might say that Jameson always oscillated between two poles of what
Said would call late style: the future-orientation strategy of Sartre and the future-disruption strategy of
Benjamin, whose own historical circumstances certainly contributed to their differing views.
F Jameson, Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future? Science-Fiction Studies, 9, 1982,
p 153.
Jameson, Progress versus Utopia, p 151.
Ahmad was thus right to draw a line through Jamesons previous work on experience, but he didnt have
the time in his polemic reply to connect it all the way.
Jameson, Progress versus Utopia, p 153.
Jameson, Progress versus Utopia, p 155.
izek, On Belief, New York: Routledge, 2000, pp 6768.
SZ
Sartre, Search for a Method, p 95.
Jameson, Postmodernism, p 68.

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Jameson, Postmodernism, p 71.

H Bergson, Matter and Memory, New York: George Allen and Unwin, 1919, p 332.
See H Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp 2122.
Jameson, Jameson on Jameson, p 47.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with such a position. A spatialized theory of experience can help us
understand many things about the present; what is questionable here is the directions into which
Jameson takes this theory.
I use the term spatial fix as a critique. It is David Harveys, and it refers to how capitalism tries to save
itself through colonial expansion when the inner contradictions are too great. See Harvey, The Spatial
Fix: Hegel, Von Thunen, and Marx, Antipode, 13, 1981, pp 112. Reprinted in Spaces of Capital:
Toward a Critical Geography, New York: Taylor & Francis, 2001, ch 14.
Jameson, Postmodernism, p 89.
Jameson, Postmodernism, p 89.
Jameson, Postmodernism, p 92. One might also note here Jamesons antedated response to Ahmad on
the relationship between global cognitive mapping in the pre- and post-industrial worlds: This is not,
then, clearly a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent
national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new
political art*if it is indeed possible at all*will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to
say, to its fundamental object*the world space of multinational capital*at the same time at which it
achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we
may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to
act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.
Jameson, Rimbaud and the Spatial Text, p 242.
In Jameson, Jameson on Jameson, pp 151170.
Jameson, Jameson on Jameson, pp 167168. Earlier in the interview, Jameson says of Paul Simons
Graceland, [Its] not only plagiarism, cultural theft, or whatever, its also a form of cultural diffusion
which is comparable, if you like, in mass culture to what the Romantics did for world culture in the early
nineteenth century (p 161). Again, this is not an either/or. There is a politics here, and there is an
attempt at cultural diffusion, whether by Simon or the Romantics. The two, indeed, are intimately linked
and we need to further think this through.
Including an unpublished seminar on the Rhetorics of Cannibalism at UC-Irvine in 1990.
Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject, interview with E Cadava, P Connor and J L Nancy, in
Points . . . Interviews, 19741994, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p 282, emphases in original.
Eating Well, emphases in original.
Jameson, Third-World Literature, p 71.
Jameson, A Brief Response, p 26.

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