I do not know if it is still there, the little bookshop on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy where, on one of those early-spring Melbourne mornings that start out chilly and ended up dusty with hot wind, I walked in for refuge from the street twenty years ago and found, toward the back, Fredric Jameson’s The Seeds of Time (1994). Its opening remarks are now an over-familiar cliché of cultural theory but, for the reader I was then, were a revelation:

Even after the ‘end of history’ there has seemed to persist some historical curiosity of a generally systemic — rather than a merely anecdotal — kind: not merely to know what will happen next, but as a more general anxiety about the larger fate or destiny of our system or mode of production as such — about which individual experience (of a postmodern kind) tells us that it must be external, while our intelligence suggests this feeling to be most improbable indeed, without coming up with plausible scenarios as to its disintegration or replacement. It seems to be easier 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.

A branch of XiAn Famous Food now occupies the space in Swanston Street that was once the second-hand bookstore where I found, some months earlier, the two volumes of The Ideologies of Theory, with its startling demand that:

In matters of art, and particularly of artistic perception, in other words, it is wrong to want to decide, to want to resolve a difficulty. What is wanted is a kind of mental procedure that suddenly shifts gears, that throws everything in an inextricable tangle one floor higher and turns the very problem itself (the obscurity of this sentence) into its own solution (the varieties of Obscurity) by widening the frame in such a way that it now takes in its own mental processes as well as the object of those processes. In the earlier, naïve state, we struggle with the object in question; in this heightened and self-conscious one, we observe our own struggles and patiently set about characterizing them.

How to observe and characterise our struggles with Jameson’s sentences, with their notorious knots and loops and semantic density, their well-night archaeological layering of reference, response, tussle and turn? I start with memories of places — lost bookshops — and block quotes to try and hold on to something of the experience of reading Jameson.

This experience was, for me, at the very first an aesthetic experience, closer to hearing a recording of Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Symphony no. 5 or becoming lost in the lushness of a late Henry James paragraph than to the usual encounter with what is called criticism or theory. The standard conservative sneer about proponents of so-called Theory losing the “common reader”, whoever they were, in the turn from literature has always, in my experience, wilted in the face of the heat of a Jameson paragraph. His is prose that radiates its own energies, enthusiasms, and pleasures. Enthusiasm for style itself, certainly, for the challenge of a certain way of writing. Jameson’s commitment to what the Preface to Lyrical Ballads calls “the grand elementary principle of pleasure” expresses itself across his writings in all manner of unchecked stylistic tics and extravagances: well-nigh, to be sure, it seems to me, each one a Jamesonian calling card of more gifts to come.

Those gifts were other writers, thinkers, concepts, moments. Jameson served as an expansive mediator, setting up texts that promised to be an encounter between a moment or text and a diverse set of thinkers. One would learn plenty along the way in the encounter, certainly, but, as time went on, what was there to return was his style itself.

I was introduced by reading Jameson to Adorno (more than once, and more than one Adorno), Benjamin, Bloch, Sōseki, Stein, and returned from each to him changed and transformed. His was a great rummaging-box of criticism, storing odds and ends in the knowledge that they might one day be refashioned and repurposed for different moments and different struggles. “I happen to feel,” he writes in The Political Unconscious (1981),

that no interpretation can be effectively disqualified on its own terms by simple enumeration of inadeqacies or omissions, or by a list of unanswered questions. Interpretation is not an isolated act, but takes place within a Homeric battlefield, on which a host of interepretive opinions and either openly or implicitly in confict.

Is the seminar room a Homeric battlefield? Probably not, but the force of the claim stands, and is perhaps more relevant now than it was decades ago, as cutbacks and rationalisations close languages departments and strip the humanities down in Australasia to ever-more etiolated versions of their former selves. Jameson’s projects where, among many other things, a lifelong battle against the Casaubons of the English Departments in favour of reading, writing, and thinking with as wide a range of languages, traditions and contexts as one could manage. His mid-80s essay on so-called Third World literature, controversial still, was, it is often forgotten, presented originally as a lecture against the Anglocentric and Eurocentric norms of literary education.

It was a battle, also, for Marxism. Jameson’s personal formation was in a highly academicised version of Marxism, drawing more on the cultural and philosophical works of the eccentric and independent-minded currents free from the imaginatively deadening hold of Stalinist Communist Parties in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s and, across the rest of his life, his work held to the Marxist project’s ambitions of human liberation, a battle against reified, commodified human interaction and for a renewed historical sense. A political perspective was not, for Jameson “some supplementary method,” not “an optional auxiliary to other other interpretive methods current today” but rather “as the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.”

The problem with horizons, though, is that you never get to reach them. Was Jameson’s dialectical capaciousness and willingness to take in — and take on — rival and alternate theories in an all-encompassing and relentless totalising reach also sometimes, well, a certain bagginess, a weighted-down stuffing of the overhead compartment of the flight of Theory? Jameson, for all his undoubted political commitments and decades-long affiliations to militant literary and political currents, seemed uninterested in, or unwilling to try, the more polemical arts of debate and dissension over strategy. It stands as a symptom that, in my rather lonely memories of the briskly technocratic and insistently post- or anti-Marxist atmosphere that was graduate school at Melbourne University of my time, Jameson was a Marxist still to be considered. When he did try his hand at strategy the results seemed to me often silly, or so general as to be little use. From Late Marxism (1990):

Our historical metabolism has undergone a serious mutation: the organs with which we register time can handle only smaller and smaller, and more and more immediate, empirical segments; the schematism of our transcendental historical imagination encompasses less and less material, and can process only stories short enough to be verifiable via television. The larger, more abstract thoughts — what is more totalizing than natural history, after all? — fall outside the apparatus; they may be true but are no longer representable — it is worse than old-fashioned to evoke them, rather a kind of blunder is involved.

Really? This felt, in the year tens of thousands marched against Howard’s WorkChoices, eventually bringing down with them more than a decade of Coalition rule, off-kilter. It is even more so now, twenty years on, amidst a revival of ecologically and social-reproduction aware Marxist scholarship and activism.

“Really, universally, relations stop nowhere,” the Master writes in his preface to Roderick Hudson (1907). Jameson worked the same way with ideas. The “exquisite problem” for them both was “but to draw, by a geometry of [their] own, the circle within which” they should, for James, “appear to do so” and, for Jameson, really do so. This was a project, across a life’s writing, of critique and redemption at the same time:

The restoration of the meaning of the greatest cultural monuments cannot be separated from a passionate and partisan assessment of everything that is oppressive in them and that knows complicity with privilege and class domination, stained with the guilt not merely of cultural in particular but of History itself as one long nightmare. (The Political Unconscious)

This I wrote, deliberately, as an obituary without details of a life, a formation, a personality, a career or a personality. I know little to nothing of any of those, and nothing in Jameson’s writing, aside from the most fragmentary and curious of notes, does anything but discourage such speculation. Styles of personality, in his writing, were nothing next to the personality of style: his contribution to the struggle for “the restoration of meaning” was those sentences that, today, as I learn of his death, rush around my mind and memory like poetry.

History is still what hurts, and Fredric Jameson’s writings are still here to help us register that wounding and working, in our registration of its effects, towards its undoing and redemption.

Image: Wikimedia Commons