Fredric Jameson > Quotes

“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”
― Fredric Jameson

“It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”
― Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

“Always historicize!”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

“I believe that the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism. I believe also that its formal features in many ways express the deeper logic of that particular social system. I will only be able, however, to show this for one major theme: namely the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has 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. Think only of the media exhaustion of news: of how Nixon and, even more so, Kennedy are figures from a now distant past. One is tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to relegate such recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past.”
― Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination.”
― Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time

“In modernism, as I will try to show later on, some residual zones of "nature" or "being" of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that "referent." Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.”
― Frederic Jameson

“History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis...”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

“But what would happen if one no longer believed in the existence of normal language, of ordinary speech, of the linguistic norm?”
― Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

“Nowhere is the hostility of the Anglo-American tradition toward the dialectical more apparent, however, than in the widespread notion that the style of these works is obscure and cumbersome, indigestible, abstract-or, to sum it all up in a convenient catchword, Germanic. It can be admitted that it does not conform to the canons of clear and fluid journalistic writing taught in the schools. But what if those ideals of clarity and simplicity have come to serve a very different ideological purpose, in our present context, from the one Descartes had in mind? What if, in this period of the overproduction of printed matter and the proliferation of methods of quick reading, they were intended to speed the reader across a sentence in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing, without suspecting that real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence?”
― Frederic Jameson

“Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.”
― Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

“We are...so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience.”
― Frederic Jameson

“Žižek seems to have got Hitchcock out of his system, if not out of his unconscious—one never does that.”
― Fredric Jameson

“. . . it is a mistake to think that Marxism is simply a type of interpretation that takes the economic "sequence" as that ultimately privileged code into which the other sequences are to be translated. Rather, for Marxism the emergence of the economic, the coming into view of the infrastructure itself, is simply the sign of the approach of the concrete.”
― Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature

“We’re all idealists, all materialists; and the final judgment or label is simply a matter of ideology, or, if you prefer, of political commitment.”
― Fredric Jameson

“the conventional sociology of literature or culture, which modestly limits itself to the identification of class motifs or values in a given text, and feels that its work is done when it shows how a given artifact “reflects” its social background, is utterly unacceptable.”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

“The novel is... the anti-form proper to modernity itself (which is to say, of capitalism and its cultural and epistemological categories, its daily life). This means... that the novel is also a vehicle of creative destruction. Its function, in some properly capitalist ‘cultural revolution’, is the perpetual undoing of traditional narrative paradigms and their replacement, not by new paradigms, but by something radically different. To use Deleuzian language for a moment, modernity, capitalist modernity, is the moment of passage from codes to axioms, from meaningful sequences, or indeed, if you prefer, from meaning itself, to operational categories, to functions and rules; or, in yet another language, this time more historical and philosophical, it is the transition from metaphysics to epistemologies and pragmatisms, we might even say from content to form.”
― Fredric Jameson

“The text is not inserted into a genetic process in which it is understood as emerging from this or that prior moment of form or style; nor is it 'extrinsically' related to some ground or context which is at least initially given as something lying beyond it. Rather, the data of the work are interrogated in terms of their formal and logical and, most particularly, their semantic conditions of possibility.”
― Fredric Jameson

“(On George Eliot's narrative strategy)
It also forfeits the great game of the omniscient narrator, which is to know secrets which none of the characters involved will ever learn, ironically taking their unhappy ignorance to the grave.”
― Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism

“Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of political attitudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future.”
― Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic

“Mi, u stvari, zamišljamo našu kulturu kao neki ogromni imaginarni muzej u kome su svi životni oblici i intelektualni stavovi podjednako dobrodošli da stoje jedan pored drugog, pod uslovom da su pristupačni samo za kontemplaciju. Tu bi tako, uporedo sa hrišćanskim misticima i anarhistima XIX veka, sa nadrealistima i renesansnim humanistima, bilo mesta i za neki marksizam koji bi bio samo jedan filozofski sistem među ostalima. Čak ni neki zahtev za apsolutnom verom ne bi smetao marksizmu da bude prihvaćen na taj način, jer u toj nama dobro poznatoj eklektičkoj tradiciji sasvim komotno koegzistiraju i same religije, pretvorene u slike. Ne, osobenost strukture istorijskog materijalizma leži u tome što on poriče autonomiju same misli, u tome što on, i sam misao, uporno dokazuje da čista misao funkcioniše kao prikriveni način društvenog ponašanja, u njegovom neugodnom podsećanju na materijalnu i istorijsku stvarnost duha. Tako marksizam, kao kulturni objekt, ustaje protiv kulturne aktivnosti uopšte, snižava joj vrednost i razgolićuje klasne privilegije i dokolicu, koji su preduslovi za uživanje u njoj.”
― Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature

“What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage.”
― Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

“We may suggest that from this perspective, ideology is not something which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal "solutions" to unresolvable social contradictions.”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

“Kapitalisme lanjut memperdagangkan banyak hal yang dulunya tidak dianggap sebagai komoditas.”
― Fredric Jameson

“The epistemological separation of colony from metropolis, the systemic occultation of the colonial labour on which imperial prosperity is based, results in a situation in which... the truth of metropolitan existence is not visible in the metropolis itself”
― Fredric Jameson

“But I do think we have an interest in at least provisionally separating this now familiar
postmodern debate from the matter of globalization, all the while under- standing only too well that the two issues are deeply intertwined and that positions on the postmodern are bound to make their way back in eventually.”
― Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic

“Nigde se, međutim, neprijateljstvo angloameričke tradicije prema dijalektičkoj ne iskazuje tako jasno kao u široko rasprostranjenom gledištu da je stil tih dela mračan i težak, nesvarljiv, apstraktan - ili, da sumiramo to u prikladnoj krilatici, germanski. Može se dopustiti da on nije u skladu sa kanonima jasnog i tečnog novinarskog pisanja kakvi se uče u našim školama. No šta ako ti ideali jasnoće i jednostavnosti služe u kontekstu naše sadašnjice sasvim drukčijoj ideološkoj svrsi od one koju je Dekart imao na umu? Šta ako su oni, u ovo naše doba hiperreprodukcije štampanih stvari i poplave metoda brzog čitanja, namenjeni tome da navedu čitaoca da brzo pređe preko rečenice, pozdravljajući u prolazu, bez napora, unapred spremljenu ideju, a da pritom i ne sluti da stvarna misao zahteva silazak u materijalnost jezika i saglasnost oblika rečenice sa samim vremenom?”
― Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature

“This synecdoche, in which the skirmish stands in for the battle, as Balzac recommended, is a far more forthright and energetic assault on the impossible problem of collective representation than anything on the Left, which is reduced to demonstrations and marches, and whose dilemmas are vividly dramatized by the fact that more actors and extras took part in Eisenstein’s filming of October than the number of actual participants in the Bolshevik revolution itself.”
― Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism

“Well, little by little that’s gonna mean that you can’t imagine a future that’s different from this one, and finally that there is no real place for negativity, for imagination, fantasy, and so forth. Therefore, one of the great… [Cough in the audience] laments of the Frankfurt School — as the postwar went on into the 1960s, and so forth — is that this society of late capitalism is removing all the possible spaces from which any negation of it could be achieved.”
― Fredric Jameson, Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson's Seminar on Aesthetic Theory

“certain kinds of analyses -- like those of Karatani here -- are analogous to creative works themselves, insofar as they propose a schema which it is the reader's task to construct and to project out onto the night sky of the mind's eye; and this is in fact, I believe, the way in which a good deal of contemporary theory is read by artists, who do no in fact use such books primarily for their perceptive contributions to the analysis of this or that familiar work of art, the way and older criticism was appealed to by readers of belles lettres. These younger "postmodern" readers, as I understand it, look at the theoretical abstractions of post-contemporary books in order to imagine the concrete referents to which those abstractions might possibly apply -- whether those are artistic languages or experiences of daily life. Here, the analysis produces the absent text of what remains to be invented, rather than modestly following along behind the achieved masterpiece with a running commentary. It is -- to use the expression again -- science-fictional (as benefits a culture like ours, just catching up with science fiction, not merely in content, but in its form): the new abstractions model the forms of reality that does not net exist, but which it would be interesting to experience.”
― Frederic Jameson

“Signatures of the Visible “Jameson aptly demonstrates why he remains among the most significant literary”
― Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible