RIP Fredric Jameson
A look at what was going on in Leftist/academic circles in 1979 around the high/low culture divide
I’m going full bore nerdy below, and but I will take you all on a journey into my reading of a critical article by Fredric Jameson, as he was on the cusp of theorizing postmodernism in relationship to 20th century division of labor and culture industry.
If you’ve read American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique and or Virtue Hoarders, you will know already that I am not a fan of 1970s-80s cultural studies. One of the main journals that promoted the work of popular culture besotted Boomer academics who were scandalizing their New Yorker reading parents and peers was Social Text, the journal that published NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s Transgressing the Boundaries
But I don’t want to rehash that stuff. We can talk about it during our October 6, 2025 reading group meeting if you like.
With Fredric Jameson’s recent passing, his article Reification and Utopia published by Social Text has been circulating. It is an exciting text that confronts head on the question of high/low culture as a function of the capitalist mode of production and follows the Adorno/Horkheimer line critique of instrumentalization which “foregrounds means over ends” and which is contrasted with “traditional activities” from a precapitalist era, where value was immanent to the activity itself. (craft, agriculture, war). What changes under capitalism, is the “universal commodification of labor.” The money form and the force of the commodity intensifies reification, or the transformation of processes into things that fit into the industrial mode of produciton.
“Human activities lose their immanent intrinsic satisfactions as activity and become means to an end. The objects of the commodity world of capitalism also shed their independent "being" and intrinsic qualities and come to be so many instruments of commodity satisfaction: the familiar example is that of tourism-the American tourist no longer lets the landscape "be its being" as Heidegger would have said, but takes a snapshot of it, thereby graphical transforming space into its own material.” (Jameson)
There is a dialectical twist to Jameson’s theorization of art and labor in this essay, but wait for the next post.
I am going to get to that reading: also typical of his idealization of non marketizable culture in the essay is his attribution of pure opposition to the commodity in working class British music, third world literature and women’s literature everything but US working class culture that had been fully commodified as rock and roll by a growing music industry. There is something so wrong here but so fascinating. Jaws is the allegorical triumph of technocracy and the PMC but he wasn’t reading Ehrenreich!
RIP Fredric Jameson - or maybe not? The struggle continues ... ?
Inspired by today's post I looked up Jameson's 1979 article, which you kindly shared with us, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture". And I skimmed it (🤯).
And was fascinated by the material discussing the film Jaws. He mentions in passing that among the many reviews of the film, that it was reviewed by Pravda - this was a time that there was "still an alternative", even if it wasn't perfect 😂 - and later that year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. (I wonder what the situation there would have been like if the Soviet Union hadn't left.)
In the article, a particular engagement with popular culture caught my eye. In a review of Jaws, Jameson highlights the revealing differences between the movie Jaws and the book Jaws. Here is an excerpt:
"Yet the most dramatic surprise the novel holds in store for viewers of the film will evidently be the discovery that in the book Hooper dies, a virtual suicide and a sacrifice to his somber and romantic fascination with death in the person of the shark. Now while it is unclear to me how the American reading public can have responded to the rather alien and exotic resonance of this element of the fantasy - the *aristocratic obsession with death* would seem to be a more European motif -- the social overtones of the novel's resolution - the triumph of the islander and the yankee over the decadent playboy challenger - are surely unmistakable, as is the systematic elimination and suppression of all such class overtones from the film itself."
Class conflict is thus suppressed in the realization of the film version of the book. Especially interesting to me is Jameson's comment on "the aristocratic obsession with death" 💀. And it is interesting in part because every year my wife and I (my wife is a high school art teacher) go to see the latest collection of high school students artworks in the local art gallery. There are typically at least a hundred works. And every year I count between 25 and 40% of the artworks deal in some way with death, expressed typically with lots of skulls.
We are in Canada and don't have the same American spirit. Nevertheless I'm pretty sure that decades or generations ago that teenage nihilism would not have been so common. My wife's poor students (literally so) have little class consciousness even while they have a vague class awareness. The school works hard of course to ensure awareness of non class difference. It is heartbreaking what is revealed by so many of the artistic productions of these kids.
I'm really looking forward to learning more about Fredric Jameson.