Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature

by Fredric Jameson

For more than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been one of the most productive, wide-ranging, and distinctive literary theorists in the United States and the Anglophone world. Marxism and Form provided a pioneering account of the work of the major European Marxist theorists--T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Luk cs, and Jean-Paul Sartre--work that was, at the time, largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Through penetrating readings of each theorist, Jameson developed a critical mode of engagement that has had tremendous influence. He provided a framework for analyzing the connection between art and the historical circumstances of its making--in particular, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or transform their circumstances through the abstractions of aesthetic form.

Jameson's presentation of the critical thought of this Hegelian Marxism provided a stark alternative to the Anglo-American tradition of empiricism and humanism. It would later provide a compelling alternative to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they became dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism.

One year after Marxism and Form, Princeton published Jameson's "The Prison-House of Language" (1972), which provided a thorough historical and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. Both books remain central to Jameson's main intellectual legacy: describing and extending a tradition of Western Marxism in cultural theory and literary interpretation.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Politics, History, Literature

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Fredric Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's the right way, the wrong way, and the dialectical way...

The chapters on the Frankfurters were pretty good, though the section on Marcuse has some Schiller and Breton boiled in, which was a little confusing. Adorno gets the party started with his thoughts on the New Music. Benjamin, Marcuse, and Bloch are the ghosts of christmas past (nostalgia for auras), present (the danger of plenitude), and future (Hope). The Lukacs chapter is very nice, tying Theory of the Novel, History and CC, and the later work on Realism all together with a pretty bow. The Sartre chapter I found increasingly abstruse until the final section, which made it worth it, and prophesies Bourdieu's existentialist/structuralist/Marxist mash-up. The final chapter allows Jameson to castigate all other literary critics soundly, from McLuhan to Eliot to Frye to Booth to mainstream historians. He also gets to weigh in on a whole coterie of 'false problems' (e.g., idealism vs materialism, diachronic vs synchronic, subjects vs objects, the supposed eternality of formal categories, economic determinism).

Hegel and Marx are friends. They think thought to the second power, i.e., thought that self-consciously thinks the thinker. Sometimes Hegel gets a little crazy, but Marx says, "Whoa there, buddy. You're standing on your head!" Hold on to the content, the concrete, even if Minerva's Owl can only tell you what happened after it's already too late. Hold on hold on hold on...

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It is more honest and more dialectical to point out that the scope and relevance of criticism varies with the historical and ideological moment itself. Thus, it has been said that lit­ erary criticism was a privileged instrument in the struggle against nineteenth-century despotism (particularly in Czar­ist Russia) , because it was the only way one could smuggle ideas and covert political commentary past the censor. This is now to be understood, not in an external, but in an inner and allegorical sense. The works of culture come to us as signs in an all-but-forgotten code, as symptoms of diseases no longer even recognized as such, as fragments of a totality we have long since lost the organs to see. In the older cul­ture, the kinds of works which a Lukacs called realistic were essentially those which carried their own interpreta­tion built into them, which were at one and the same time fact and commentary on the fact. Now the two are once again sundered from each other, and the literary fact, like the other objects that make up our social reality, cries out for commentary, for interpretation, for decipherment, for diagnosis. It appeals to the other disciplines in vain: Anglo­ Amerioan philosophy has long since been shorn of its dan­gerous speculative capacities, and as for political science, it suffices only to think of its distance from the great political and Utopian theories of the past to realize to what degree thought asphyxiates in our culture, with its absolute inability to imagine anything other than what is. 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. May it prove equal to the task!”

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The truth is that although Jameson writes difficult prose, Jameson is a great, even a dangerously great stylist--dangerous because he makes foolish ideas sound compelling. Here he combines truly starry-eyed, quasi-messianic-utopian Marxism with the high Yale mode of stuffy pronouncement in the name of good sense. This book might also be, along with the works of David "Sir David" Bromwich, the last monument of appreciative literary-criticism by reverent paraphrase. Anyway, the chapter on Adorno is good, there are good dialectical insights about the relation of literary form to historical development, and, despite the sickening spectacle of Jameson in 1971 citing the works of Mao Zedong and the events of the Cultural Revolution as model advances in social development, the book strikes me as relatively recuperable for a sane historicist literary theory, one that doesn't have to assert that the meaning of literary form is that the Revolution is coming.

[Mack]

i could sort of feel myself becoming a better reader the further into this i got. reading the no exit sartre collection of plays while reading the sartre section was really rewarding

[Jomar Canales Conde · Rating 5 out of 5]

una lectura indispensable!!!

[Diego Fernández Acebo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maravilla de libro. Ya no solo por el repaso a cierto marxismo occidental, en la línea de Perry Anderson y Terry Eagleton, sino por todos los “posibles” que ofrece Jameson para analizar los fenómenos culturales.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spellbinding exegesis, a lodestar for (Western) Marxism. More than a mere recapitulation of the life and works of the thinkers, Jameson scrutinizes the subjects, extending their key concepts and applying them to contemporary tasks. Absolutely essential reading, not only for the choir of recalcitrant leftists learning Jamesonese, but artists, philosophers, and critics.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's be honest: dialectics isn't the easiest thing in the world to understand, and Jameson isn't the simplest of writers. The complexity of his writing matches a clear complexity of thought, however - his intelligence, the depth of his cultural references, and dialectical skills are unparalleled by any other alive. A great thinker, a witty and intelligent theorist, and a brilliant critic. Marxism and Form is just enrapturing. The more one reads of Jameson, the more things begin to slot into place!

[Maja Solar · Rating 4 out of 5]

iako me ne zanima teorija književnosti (niti teorija umetnosti ), a također su mi bliže marksističke teorije koje udaljavaju Hegela od Marxa a ne ove koje ih približavaju, ipak mi se knjiga dosta svidela. Džejmsonova erudicija je opčinjavajuća. volim knjige za koje se moraš malo pomučiti u čitanju iako su dosta uzbudljive, iz kojih stvarno nešto možeš naučiti, čak i kada se ne slažeš sa koncepcijom. ovde se pored upoznavanja sa različitim dijalektičkim pristupima - Adorna, Benjamina, Markuzea, Šilera, Bloha, Lukača i Sartra - daju konture toga šta bi bila dijalektička književna kritika...

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sartre chapter aside, an accessible overview of different critical approaches that have a connection to Marxism.

[Harry · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with most Jameson, I understood about a fifth. But that fifth was insightful, and the rest was a fun ride

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marxism and Form provides an excellent overview of western Marxist aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century. Jameson provides a clear and accessible explication of the Hegelian Marxists: Lukacs, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and Bloch; as well as an extended analysis of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. The chapters on Lukacs and the German critical theorists offer clear descriptions of each author's treatment of their respective aesthetic field as it pertains to Marxist dialectics, whether that is music, movies, theater or the novel. But it is in Jameson's extended treatment of Sartre where the book really shines. Jameson treats the Critique of Dialectical Reason within the context of Sartre's entire existentialist and literary project, showing the continuum of thought and the relevance of Sartre's vision for aesthetic and Marxist theory. His description of Sartre's philosophy provided me with a greater understanding, insight and appreciation of Sartre, a philosopher whom I have not seriously thought about for years. I enjoyed and appreciate this book immensely.

[Solo Wrightson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A phenomenal work which reviews the key thinkers who laid foundations for Western Marxism. The work's importance lies most in the fact that Jameson tried recklessly to import the continental tradition relatively alien, if not proactively suppressed and demonized by the ruling class ideology advocated by various sources of mass media and popular cultural productions, to American readers at the time when the norm of thinking was governed by the historical context of Cold War, Vietnam War, McCarthyism, "Loss of China", and so on.

Jameson's thesis consists in his emphasis on the form, instead of content, of Marxian dialectics, no longer as an auxiliary function but the very essence of the works he cites throughout his book. This extends to his critique on the phenomenon of revolution as such; that the significance of revolutionary events as recorded in history, such as the Convention, the Terror, and the establishment of First Republic in France, the 1848 March in Prussia, Cultural Revolution in Mao's China, Cuban Revolution, and so on and so forth should be found in the "revolutionary moment", more than the outcomes, that they produced: "The protagonists of the French Revolution ... meant ... merely the definitive choice of a particular political form of government and the elaboration of a constitution. Whereas the continuation of the revolution in a socialist country had to do with a social and technological transformation which has no foreseeable end." (p. 267)

For this clarification, Jameson dedicates 100 pages to Sartre, who is conventionally thought as an existentialist philosopher, dramatist, novelist rather than a Marxist dialectician. Whereas for the traditional or orthodox Marxist historians ideology-formation is determined by the mode of production of the specific time–that is to say, it consists of the manifestations of material conditions of reality–Sartrean historicism recognizes the negative relationship between the subject and the object in which human, whether the worker or the factory-owner, is compelled to react against the background of the machine, the factory, other workers, and so on, so that their consciousness and the ideologies which derive from it are determined to 'reflect' negatively the situation precipitated by the mode of production. Following this, the economic base is seen as the result of transformation of the predecessors of history which then provides the background against which the new generation endeavors to resist, or revolutionize the existing structure. Jameson comments that Sartre tried to do to economics what Marx did to philosophy by introducing historical materialism, perhaps in the fashion in which Hegel indoctrinated the end of history; when a discourse develops further and further away from the reality object of their studies into abstractions, someone needs to put the whole tradition into scrutiny, and demystify the field through the uses of a superior rhetoric. The merit of dialectics, Jameson argues, like revolution, is in the euphoric, or "apocalyptic" moment of recognition or the failure of recognition as in 'the shudder felt in a descending elevator or a falling airplane in turbulence'. Whereas that of Hegelianism is characterized by its "hair-splitting" rigor which demystifies the myth of simplicity, the Marxist method cuts the knots quilted by a hobbyist's play of abstraction of reality to bring him to the "grossest of the truths". (p.308-9)

Couple of more points are in order in the concluding chapter about the key principles, history, and effects regarding the technique of dialectics and why it is relevant to the reality of the American society at the turn from the 60s often seen as the period when the cultural and political turmoil as the aftermaths of WWII made it ever more difficult and confusing for the ordinary public to understand the immediate occurring of their everyday life. Most important to be note are his remarks on how Marx's philosophy, as well as that of Hegel, should be read in context of the historical situations which gave the very space to their thoughts, and what they did in effect in regard to the situations in which the thinkers found themselves. Dialectics is, the author argues, a tool which "projects us out of our own concepts into genuine reality. [...] The task of genuine dialectical thinking is to spring us outside our own hardened ideas into a new and more vivid apprehension of reality." (p.372) 'Hermeneutically speaking, much of modern thought consists in an unconscious movement toward the ultimate dialecticism which works to dispense with the baggage of system or metaphysical content.' (p.373) Thus, regarding the shift that occurred in the modernist production of art from a spiteful, isolated middle-class writer's critique whose interpretation was inherent within it, toward fragmented pieces of popular entertainment which works to disguise the reality of work and production is worthy of remark for him: "The fact of work and production–a key to genuine historical thinking–is a secret carefully concealed as anything else in our culture. This indeed is the meaning of commodity as a form, to obliterate the signs of work on the product in order to make it easier for us to forget the class structure, which is its organizational framework." (p.407-8)

The lengthy essay, often acclaimed as Jameson's first opus magnum, lays out some of the foundational theses which put in context, and each develops further in, his later important works such as Ideologies of Theory, the Political Unconscious, Post-Modernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and Allegory and Ideology (Those are the works I know of). The work is didactic to and a must-read for aspiring cultural critics and serious Marxist intellectuals who mean to read through their immediate experiences of contemporaneous cultural and political productions which otherwise could seem unrelatable to the deeper inner content of their own lives, their own histories conducted not independently from the geographical and technological particularities–according to Jameson.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book freaked me out. it not only looked like the satanic bible, but it was written in the convoluted, highly cryptic language made fashionable by structuralists. but the premise of the book, that the form of each genre is historically significant, is pretty awesome.

[Iñigo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't care what anybody says about Jameson being a bad writer, at least from this book I can say for sure that you don't get such excellent and in-depth explanations of these kinds of dense topics by being a bad writer.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard-going! For the most part, the continuities of Jameson’s arguments entered my brain as discontinuous insights and aphorisms—too bad I haven’t read every single author and philosopher that ever existed in the European and North American continents. But some sporadic take-aways:

1. What is dialectical thinking? “Nothing more or less than the elaboration of dialectical sentences”! Huh!? Per Jameson, it is a kind of self-consciousness, inscribed in the sentence itself. Not the banal “self-consciousness” of middle-class anxiety and neurosis, but rather a mental procedure in regards to our object, “which throws everything in an inextricable tangle one floor higher,” and, with a swoop, transforms our given problem into its own solution. “Dialectical thinking is thought about thought, thought to the second power… which at the same time remains aware of its own intellectual operations in the very act of thinking.” We widen our framing, or rather, stand up and walk behind the frame to examine the limits of our own thinking position in the historical process, to “assess the very origin of the subject-object relationship in the first place.” The whole process of thinking becomes implicit in and at one with its object. In a breathless moment, what initially appeared as an issue of interpretation and the urge to resolve an immediate difficulty is suddenly a revelation with its attendant “shock”: a restoration of the original meaning without the distortions of the censor, a re-immersion back into the world. And this jolt to revelation can take only the form of an investigation of why the distortions appeared in the first place, of the process of censorship itself. So for Marx, the point is not that the exchange-value of commodities is really socially-necessary labor manifest in a mystified form. (The classical political economists had already worked that out, however shakily.) Rather, the point is the investigation of the logical and historical process of this mystification itself, where by the end, the fact that the whole world of commodities appears reversed in our vision is inseparable from the fact that it could not appear otherwise.

2. Those second-order transitions are exhilarating—that feeling of “epistemological shock” is no joke! The most fun one might be Jameson taking on his own commentary as an example to commentate the very limits of the category of the “example” as a deficiency of dialectical thought. And in self-consciously taking the category of the “example” as an example itself, Jameson illustrates that “the only genuinely concrete presentation of dialectical criticism is the practice of such criticism itself.” There’s also a footnote about footnotes, too. I suppose if I tried something like that on this review site it’d involve an extended discussion about Otaku: Japan's Database Animals.

3. Jameson’s firm focus on form affirms the absolute standard to which Marxist critique must hold itself up to. (There is an enlightening critique of vulgar Marxist art criticism in the context of Marx and Engels’ critique of Lassalle’s Sickingen, by which characters are sutured onto pre-made class schemas and made to be mere archetypes or representatives of pre-given class forces in a kind of Platonic idealism. (Perhaps the greater point is that dialectical or concrete thinking by its very nature cannot be made into an a priori schematic, since our categories must emerge from the investigation of the object itself. In this sense Stalin’s classic/infamous pamphlet should be seen as a compromise of its period.)) Jameson certainly lives up to it, but can we? It’s tough.

4. The discussion of the diachronic and synchronic tendencies of Marxism (as two languages or “codes”), the opposition of which is a symptom of the commodity fetish in reality, in the Sartre chapter is really fascinating. I’ll have to come back to it…

5. The approving citation of Lin Biao’s “Long Live the Victory of People’s War” in a short paragraph about Third-Worldism is kind of amazing. There’s even an implicit demarcation between “working-classes” and “proletariat.”

[isaac smith]

I just have to take note of the quote from Alana Scott's reply to Andrew's review. I take it as there are two bimodal meanings to religion (two bumps on a chart).

In my language, one meaning of religion is "An Introduction to Modes of Exchange" (2017) by
Kojin Karatani, where religion is mode D. Ernst Bloch criticized historical materialist theory for its limitations, and in his work "Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of Revolution" (1921), he aimed to connect socialist revolution with religion. Despite Lukacs considering this a deviation from Marxism, it's noted that Engels had faced a similar issue in 1848. Engels, acknowledging the inadequacy of an approach centered on 'productive forces and relations of production,' explored the possibility of class struggle and socialist revolution. He delved into researching peasant movements in sixteenth-century Germany, particularly Thomas Müntzer's ideas, recognizing that the driving force for socialism comes from the ideational/religious dimension, rather than solely economic contradictions. Engels then embarked on a lifelong study of primitive Christianity, though he never fully resolved the question at hand. Engels' insights in "The Peasant War in Germany" extend beyond the West and Christianity. In Japan during the sixteenth century, significant peasant wars coincided with social transformations influenced by the world market. Notably, the emergence of mode D was linked to a Buddhist sect, the True Pure Land School. Despite these peasant wars resulting in defeat, akin to Germany's Peasant Wars, they shaped Japan's trajectory, leading to the establishment of the Tokugawa feudal system and closed-country edict. This parallel prompts reflection on Engels' assertion that the defeat of Peasant Wars in Germany set back the country's modernization by two centuries.

The other meaning is more colloquial from Emily (on Twitter @the_aiju) that religion is like a problematic piece of media with a pretty toxic fanbase but some of the fan created content will change your relationship with life in such a positive way it makes up for everything else.

So, here is the quote from Alana Scott's reply to Andrew's review:

"the notion that Marxism is itself a kind of religion is one of the principal arguments of the anti-Communist arsenal; the idea, no doubt, is that it is shamefaced religion, a religion which does not wish to know its own name. Yet it has always seemed to me a peculiar reproach, one which cuts both ways: an assimilation of Marxism to religion in particular would seem to reduce the religions to the status of purely secular ideologies. The revealing anaology, in other words, is at this point not so much that Marxism with religion, as that of religions with Marxism...Faith is to be described essentially as the longing to have faith, that the nature of belief lies not so much in some apprehension of the presence of God as rather his silence, his absence -- in short, that there is basically no real difference between a believer and a non-believer in the first place....If the works of Marx and Engles have become what are derisively called sacred writings, sources of abusive quotation and misinterpretation, this stems not so much from some unconscious parody of the Bible as from the essential structure of a universal culture itself, and the central position within it of that text or letter around which it is organized, and which serves as a common set of solutions or dogma, of universally imposed content, but rather a common set of problems, a shared form through which the most culturally heterogeneous situations may be understood" (117-118 Fredric Jameson "Marxism and Form).

[Neal Spadafora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Against Jameson's insistence on following the minutia of a text, I read sections of this book closer than other sections. Nevertheless, it is an impressive book that demonstrates the difficulties of writing on cultural production. Perhaps what I found most helpful was how he does so much more than identify a given cultural product within its economic milieu. Indeed, the book gives consistent attention to 'form,' and the genesis of various forms. From the development of early Enlightenment orchestral forms to the position of the subject in late modern novels, Jameson seems to have more or less studied every cultural product of the past two centuries.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the final summation in the concluding chapter deeply disappointing; I felt that Jameson, in not drawing direct and clearly stated political conclusions, cheapens the thought of the Marxian dialectics he surveys so adroitly and goes so far as to limit the scope of literature's ability to produce knowledge-content, thereby reducing it to the status background noise in an already overloaded culture. Three stars.

[Barry Smirnoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very difficult text with philosophical jargon that makes reading it a struggle. The introduction of Western European radical theorists of dialectical criticism to American academics. Jameson is brilliant and I have the highest respect for his work. This text is like learning a new language as he straddles the different vocabularies of these critics. I encourage you to stick with it and consult the works themselves, thus expanding your horizons to encompass this foundational work.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

the first few chapters are five star stuff but then it grinds to a halt in 100 pages about sartre

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only read Benjamin, Marcuse, and Adorno. Plan to finish later, but for the moment it's a great time; Jameson always a pleasurably dense stylist.

[Oxi]

Oh, it`s a very good book!

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difficult, worth it. I think?

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

After postmodernism and political unconscious, his best work.

[Ivan Labayne]

ang librong ayaw i-date ng Super Bowl at Kenshin

[A L]

Beautifully written. The Lukacs chapter ended too soon.