Fredric Jameson on Reification and Utopia continued

a fleeting vision of the intellectual in the 1970s

The fact that Jameson focused on Jaws and The Godfather, parts 1 and 2 at the end of an essay on mass vs. elite culture and their interpenetration was no doubt, in 1979, scandalous and refreshing. The fact that he brings forth a reference to the “chanson de geste” reflects his own grounding in French literature.

But does Jameson’s theory of reification and utopia offer the view of epic historical materialism that we want?

I’m going to say that there is a HUGE blindspot or repressed element of materialist analysis to confirm that the answer is no.

First, he idealizes and maybe this is because the Soviet Union still has a sphere of influence authentic cultural production in “marginal pockets of the social life of the world system: “black literature and blues, British working class rock, women’s literature, gay literature, the roman quebecois, Third World literature…”

I started laughing really hard about the roman quebecois, but then I was like, how could he not see that black literature could just as easily be commodified as women’s literature? Second wave feminism was suppressing labor issues for issues of representation, recognition, etc. AND Third World literature was fully integrated into the world system of prestige and liberal publishing, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez onward through the Nobel Prize, etc. In Postmodernism and the Logic of Late Capitalism, he talks about feminism and Maoism as offering impenetrable redoubts of oppositionality.

Vivek Chibber showed that the Third World bourgeoisie was happy to monopolize Third World representations in the Angloe-American world. The industrialization of East Asia taking place at that time through US trade and industrial policy would make that category moot and devastate American manufacturing, which was sacrificed to Cold War politics. The strength of the American working class was not as reduced as it was today.

The seventies were a time of enormous worker unrest, wild cat and sit down strikes abounded. But it was the beginning of working class marginalization in the liberal imagination and the Democratic Party. It was a time of working class struggle. And it was heartbreaking to contemplate the ways in which management was increasingly ruthless in suppressing working class interests. Would a Marxist professor stop looking abroad for class contradiction? He would have to look no further than at Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, U.S.A. for a heartbreaking account of Kentucky coal miners early 1970s strike actions against Duke Energy. Jefferson Cowie and Judith Stein have documented the critical state of class war in the 1970s in the United States.

Also, Jameson’s discussion of film genre does not shed light on the studio system and its mimetic relationship to industrial modes of production. Genre films were standard products that could be made cheaply by recycling sets, stars and props.

And finally, The Godfather series was a product of the New Hollywood: the studios gave free rein to young and in Jameson’s words, ‘ethnic’ directors. Jaws (1976) along with Star Wars as two box office hits, put an end to that brief period of experimentation.

We discussed Robert Warshow’s “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” in film noir discussion groups. Warshow was a Left film critic who was able to capture the experience of an ordinary fan of the gangster genre, sitting in the dark, watching the 20th century spectacle of tragic drama unfold before his bedazzled eyes.

Anyway, I’ve got a new reading of Jaws to chew on given my reading of this essay. My skepticism about Jameson puts me in the minority of film professors of my generation. I have lost job opportunities because of my criticism of his methodology, but I stand by them. I’m sure he was very lovely and generous man. I went to his lectures on postmodernism at Peking University. We had drinks, smoked cigarettes. He was looking for the Third World and surrounded by translators and acolytes. I knew I could not be his follower.