The Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson can be deemed to be a simple “old-fashioned snob” — and it was that snobbery which drove his criticisms of postmodernism. For example, Jameson once spoke about “the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Readers Digest culture”. Of course, the word “snob” (or “snobbery”) is hyperbolic. Yet it has been aimed at many people who’ve held views which are very similar to Jameson’s — if only in the limited respects discussed in this essay. [See note 1.]
“Madonna is a myth in the Barthesian sense, a perpetually self-referential sign-system that deconstructs its own ontology, a palimpsest of identities that both invokes and subverts the phallocentric narratives of authenticity and origin. She is a Möbius strip of subjectivity, simultaneously constructing and dismantling the self through a mise-en-abîme of performances that destabilize the binary oppositions of sacred/profane, masculine/feminine, and real/artificial.”
— Georges-Claude Guilbert, Madonna as Postmodern Myth (2002, p. 11)
“Marxism returns against cultural activity in general to devalue it and to lay bare the class privileges and the leisure which it presupposes for its enjoyment.”
— Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature
Was Jameson a Marxist Snob?
In terms of the title of this essay again. The usual argument — from Marxists — is that Fredric Jameson “explicitly rejects any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon”. Instead, he’s deemed to be simply uncovering the (Marxist) reality beneath the surface phenomena. Indeed, such things were also said about Karl Marx and his own writings about capitalism. However, in both cases, this is manifestly false. One only needs to read their writings to quickly realise this.
Now take the following quote (which was partially quoted in the introduction) from Jameson:
“This is perhaps the most distressing development of all from an academic standpoint, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Readers Digest culture.”
If this passage had come from a non-Marxist, or from any conservative, he would be classed as a “snob” by many people on the Left, and certainly by most postmodernist philosophers and theorists.
In any case, the literary theorist, critic and Marxist Fredric Jameson informed his readers about postmodernism. He highlighted
“the effacement in it of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture”.
So does all that mean that Jameson had an interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture?
On all this, Jameson was singing from the same hymn sheet as Theodore Adorno (of the Frankfurt School) and Noam Chomsky. (See later section.)
Yet, over the decades, many radicals and Marxists have been keen to tell us that the “realm of high or elite culture” is itself “snobby” and/or a “tool used by the ruling class”. Doesn’t — or didn’t — it uphold the class structure of capitalism?
In the first passage above, Jameson qualified his own snobbery (if that’s what it was) by using the words “from an academic standpoint”. It’s not clear why he added those words. Was he hedging?
Jameson had a point about postmodernist philosophers and their theories. After all, historically, the “elite” was said (at least by some) to have passed on “high culture” to society as a whole. The postmodernist elite, on the other hand, climbed the educational ladder that gave them their wealth and institutional power. And, while safe and sound at the top, worked against (to refer back to Jameson’s words) “transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading” to all the plebs beneath them.
George Walden (in his book New Elites: A Career in the Masses) claimed that (postmodernist?) elitists now praise pop culture, question aesthetic hierarchies, and even acquire mockney (or estuary English) accents at public schools. (George Walden used to be a Tory politician.) [See note 2.]
What has any of that to do with postmodernism?
Demolishing aesthetic hierarchies, offering pretentious and convoluted accounts of, say, Madonna [see here], etc. occurred in the academic world of the 1980s and 1990s, and it all filtered down to journalists, political activists, teachers, public servants… and public schools.
Perhaps it was the philosopher Jean Baudrillard and those other outré postmodernists who carried all this to an extreme in which Madonna was deemed to be a “genius” [see here] and “the Gulf War never happened”.
All that said, Jameson didn’t believe that “high art” was entirely forgotten by postmodernists. Instead, rather than quoting, say, Joyce or Mahler,
“they incorporate[ed] them, to the point where the line between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw”.
Thus, according to Jameson, high art was subverted by postmodernists, rather than simply ignored.
Jameson on Our Sense of History and the Media
Jameson went to explain his position by citing “one major theme” of the era in which he was writing: “the disappearance of a sense of history”. That’s a huge claim if was meant to be about what Jameson called “late capitalism” as a whole.
Did the ideas and theories of postmodernist philosophers and theorists bring about this disappearance of a sense of history?
Jameson did say that his words were also about “our entire contemporary social system”. So this is both about the entire social system and how postmodernism, specifically, brought about the disappearance of a sense of history.
This brings us to the media.
It’s not a surprise that Jameson focused on a part of the superstructure that Marxists have traditionally focussed upon: the media.
Jameson blamed the Media for the disappearance of the past. He put it in the following way:
“One is tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to relegate such historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past. The informational function of the media would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia.”
Jameson believed that there are strong reasons as to why the Media relegated such historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past. Why so? He believed that it served a political purpose. That is, it served late capitalism to obliterate historical consciousness.
Yet the media (or parts thereof) may inadvertently obliterate history for far more mundane reasons than that. To make things simple and digestible. Could the Media in any society really spend that much time on history? (Even on recent history?) After all, the media is the media and history is history. Of course, the Media can cover history, but it would still be the Media when it does so.
Did the Media obliterate the crimes of Nazism and fascism? What about the crimes of communist states?
Jameson on Real History vs Fake Images
Jameson said that “two features of postmodernism” include
“the transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents”.
So, more technically, Jameson tied the obliteration of history to the postmodernist focus on “images”. (Refer back to the Madonna photo and the postmodernist quote at the head of this essay.)
Is this an account of postmodernism society itself or of postmodernist positions on society?
It seems that Jameson was saying that postmodernism itself had transformed reality into images. (Postmodernist philosophy had been made concrete.)
Jameson also stated that postmodernism carried out
“the transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents”.
It’s hard to grasp what’s being said here, at least from the outside of Jameson’s Marxist-academic milieu.
For a start, surely images can represent reality. Images alone don’t obliterate reality. Yet, arguably, there were postmodernist philosophers who did attempt to obliterate reality. Jameson might have been right about that. [See my ‘How Jean Baudrillard (the Philosopher) Tried to Annihilate the World’.] That said, he wasn’t really talking about postmodernist theories: he was talking about the Media. More clearly, was he was talking about how postmodernist theories had an impact on the Media.
In terms of the Media and, indeed, images of events, moments in history, etc., then even if they are images of the past, they still occur in the present. Thus, news items about the 1968 student demonstrations occur in the present. Clips from Nazi Germany are shown in the present. So Jameson was saying more than that. He was saying that (such) historical times were turned into perpetual presents. That is, representations of past times made such times seem present.
The meat of Jameson theory is the following:
“[We have] begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve.”
This is an odd passage for a Marxist. Jameson appears to be defending “traditions” and their “preservation”. Of course, this may not really be a defence of traditions: it may simply be a factual account of late capitalism and its relation to postmodernism. That said, this passage from Jameson doesn’t come across that way.
Here again it needs to be established as to whether Jameson was talking about postmodernism or about “our entire contemporary social system”. It seems that he fused both these things.
Part Two: Adorno and Chomsky
Fredric Jameson and Theodore Adorno
It may seem odd — or even artificial — to bring up Adorno. However, even in the 21st century we had the music critic Alex Ross (who specialises in classical music) writing in The New Yorker about Adorno. He claimed that Adorno is more relevant than ever. Now also take the Marcusian literary scholar Jack Zipes who still (i.e., after Adorno) expresses things in terms of mass commercialisation.
As for Jameson himself, it’s clear that Jameson’s drew on Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture industry, which included the arts, film, architecture, etc. Thus, it’s no surprise that Jameson too tackled the entire culture industry.
Adorno’s own snobbery (which was far more severe than Jameson’s) is best exemplified by the fact that he believed that the working class was no longer a “revolutionary movement”. Instead, it consisted of the passive victims of the culture industry. (This is a little like the cogs — or created “subjects” — in Louis Althusser’s version of the capitalist system.)
Adorno and Jameson are dead. Chomsky isn’t.
Noam Chomsky on the Culture Industry
Chomsky is more direct and specific than Jameson. He believes that soccer and soaps are trivial. He also believes that they have had a profound influence on American politics and the psychologies of Americans. When it comes specifically to soccer, Chomsky believes that it produces an “irrational loyalty to some sort of meaningless community [and is a] training for subordination to power and for chauvinism”.
Chomsky also deems soccer and soaps to be parts of capitalism’s “power systems”. More specifically, they’re domains in which Americans “internalize the values of the elite”. (Has Chomsky brought the Marxist notion of false consciousness back to life?)
Chomsky, like Jameson, has also resurrected the Frankfurt School’s notion of the culture industry. Adorno’s snobbery was aimed not at Chomsky’s soaps and soccer, but primarily at jazz, the cinema, etc. [See here.] More specifically, Adorno stated that “the paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery”.
There have been reactions against Chomsky’s position on soccer (if not soaps), and not only from postmodernists. Take the following as an example:
“[T]he idea that sport is a meaningless activity beneath the intelligence of ordinary human beings is condescending at best. Sport, like art, sweetens life; whether they realize it or not, it is probably the source of many people’s notions of beauty, solidarity, and greatness.”
On the other hand, Britain’s very own “Marxist professor”, Terry Eagleton, took Chomsky’s side (or position) on football. Writing in the British newspaper the Guardian, he wrote:
“If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football. No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up…”
In that article, Eagleton even went so far as to say that football should be abolished.
Chomsky also believes that soccer — or watching it — “contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes” than anything else. However, the most important Chomskyan case against football is that it “keeps people away from other things” (i.e., politics and activism).
Chomsky also believes that soap operas “teach people [ ] passivity and absurdity”.
Conclusion
It can be suggested that at the heart of Chomsky’s critique of sports, as well as Jameson’s critique of postmodernism, is the ability of the culture industry (including soccer and soaps) to take people away from (Marxist and leftwing) politics and activism.
Another way of putting that is to argue that Chomsky and Jameson (possibly?) assumed that entertainment for entertainment’s sake is automatically and necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, it probably is a bad thing from a Chomskyan or Marxist perspective. After all, if art and sport have no political or social content, then are they worthless? (This is what many people on the Left have argued in the past.) In fact, are they politically dangerous?
The Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht put the Jamesonian-Chomskyan position on the culture industry in the following way:
“[S]ocial [i.e., political] content is an absolutely decisive condition for such development [of ‘artistic forms’]. Any formal innovation which does not serve and derive its justification from its social [political] content will remain utterly frivolous.”
Note
(1) The essay above isn’t about Fredric Jameson simply being a snob. It’s about Jameson being a snob and a Marxist. It isn’t even a criticism of snobbery when it comes to “high” and “low” culture. (In fact, I’m a bit of a “culture snob” myself.) So Marxism and snobbery is an interesting fusion.
(2) Some readers may remember public-school boy and former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s glottal-stop accent and his championship of Britpop. I doubt that he would have ever waxed lyrically about Edward Elgar or Peter Maxwell Davies.
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