A quick note: Verso Books, Jameson’s publisher and the most important producer of left-wing books in the English-speaking world, is in dire financial straits. I encourage readers to donate to their fundraising campaign.
This summer was one of the most dismal in recent memory. We may not want to acknowledge it, but Fredric Jameson reminded us all by dying. The titan of Marxist cultural criticism passed away on the first official day of autumn, right at the end of Kamala’s Brat Summer. This man, whose writing never flinched from difficulty or pessimism, who held out through decades of facile postmodern dross and managed to make it to the age of 90, couldn’t bear to see what came after. And really, can you blame him?
I am being facetious writing this, but not by much. Jameson’s entire oeuvre was dedicated to understanding how inane our erstwhile culture had become. How this mush of vague signifiers, seemingly floating independent of each other, begging us to grip onto one of them out of hope for some sort of traction and meaning, in fact just denies us any way of understanding the world. When Charli XCX tweeted “Kamala is brat,” thus merging the Democrats’ electoral fortunes with #bratsummer and kicking off a season of cathartic enthusiasm, it was yet another instance of Jameson proven painfully right.
It has all been very annoying, but also understandable. Kamala Harris has a much better chance of beating Donald Trump than the slowly crumpling Joe Biden had. I’ve argued as much elsewhere, and it should be obvious to anyone paying even the most cursory attention. If nothing else, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz have a more canny understanding of the current social industry and cultural lay of the land. They know how to post, how to meme-ify themselves, and how to sum up their positions coherently and relatably.
Those several weeks when Kamala came to embody the summer’s zeitgeist – or at least when it became possible to insist as much – was probably inevitable. In any event it was necessary to reinvigorate a base that hasn’t had the momentum of Trump’s embattled but mobilized hard core. That nobody caught in the fervor was bothering to ask what it actually means that Kamala is brat was besides the point. What did it mean for anything to “be brat” in the first place?
“You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things some times,” Charli explained online. “Who feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.”
A few of these – blunt honesty, for example – are things we ostensibly want in a president. But volatility, saying stupid things, having a breakdown? These are, ostensibly, exactly what the Democrats are warning of, and indeed, what we’ve seen, in Donald Trump.
But no matter. The important thing is that everyone feels better. Worried about the repression of pro-Palestine protests? You’re a hater. What about her track record of locking up black teens? Don’t kill the vibe!
Now, the weather is getting cooler, election day is drawing near, and reality is sinking in: Trump’s base is, a few small exceptions notwithstanding, intact and committed. While you’ve been vibing, their chief ideologues have been chipping away at any safeguards against election fraud. The polls, their reliability already called into question by the experience of 2016, aren’t as encouraging for Harris as they should be. For the most part, Democrats have no idea what to do about it. Materiality always manages to take its revenge.
It is increasingly difficult to ignore how static and passive culture has become, how overtaken it is by the vibe, the mood, the experience, handed down readymade rather than actively participated in. The commodity’s logic of reification, privileging the self-contained and motionless over the dynamic, finds new ways to worm its way into our daily lives and dispositions.
When he published his landmark Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991, Jameson called this “a new depthlessness.” It’s not so new anymore, but has gotten a lot shallower. It also, as he warned, obscures the very real and very powerful, often intricate movements of capitalism itself. Whether we call it aestheticization, the spectacle, hypermediation, or any number of other Very Smart Terms, its effect is essentially that of hiding or mystifying the machinations of events in such a way that our alienation from them is crystalized and understood as normal.
This is not a phenomenon isolated to politics. Still, that it has reached as far as it has into political culture does reveal some dismal realities of our moment. First, that the commodity form and democracy are ultimately incompatible and irreconcilable. The more broadly this commodified cultural mode disseminates, the more it enables the most fiercely undemocratic elements in any society. Feels overcome meaning, with isolated individuals declaring their experience trumps the hard facts of social reality. (Adam Johnson breaks down the ramifications for this in a recent post whre he describes the ascendancy of JD Vance as “the grim rise of conservative standpoint theory.”)
Second, if this is what a flat and commodified culture does to democracy, then looking in the other direction, we must wonder how undemocratic our culture has already become, even leaving aside voting booths, news organization polling, and the other trappings of bourgeois democracy. How many expressions are smothered in their crib by an avalanche of hot takes and manufactured outcry, boosted by the tiresome algorithm?
Much of Jameson’s work elsewhere seems to have been dedicated to digging beneath this kind of detritus. Though it was published an entire decade before Postmodernism, his book The Political Unconscious seems to cut through all the mystification he identifies. Perhaps it is because there is so much more loose ideological garbage to heap on everything, the insistence that it can be part of a unified totality that much stranger and unbelievable. But the critical ethic he insists upon – “Always historicize!” – both provides graceful simplicity and presents a monumental challenge.
Particularly because it requires taking psychoanalysis seriously. The default setting for most of the Left these days is to analyze everything through a historical lens that is sheerly historical. What I mean by that is that it doesn’t look at the life and machinations of our damaged minds as a part of the historical process. The problem this presents is that we are left with a manichaean, paint-by-numbers understanding of history. We talk of how people can change history and how people’s consciousness can be changed to make these radical transformations possible. We also talk about changes in culture and politics impacting our worldview. But when it comes time to explain how those changes in consciousness take place, we end up mostly insisting on the why. The very thing that helps us map the totality of the world – the mind – is treated like a passive object.
Jameson doesn’t do that. In that respect, The Political Unconscious isn’t merely a book about how bourgeois ideology brings itself to bear on literature and art, but a suggestion that the Left must understand consciousness as a collective project, and therefore an active one. If Raymond Williams (with whose work Jameson always seems to be in conversation) wrote that feelings were components of a structure rather than something to be lazily inhabited, then Jameson asked, quite incisively, how those feelings might be structured, and by whom.
The “by whom” does a lot of work here, and that’s rather the point. We are only ever rarely conscious of the ideas that guide our artistic and aesthetic expressions – depthless, individualistic, often cruel and cynical. Though this goes just as much for those who own the means of cultural production, this does not negate that they benefit from these ideas far more than your average painter, musician, actor, writer, or audience member.
To become conscious of this process then is a radical potential, opening up chances to reimagine our entire way of life more democratically. We can be in active control of these structures of feeling. Understanding this, grasping this potential, we start to see how the prefabricated vibe, the feeling inhabited rather than forged, is a dismal kind of pacification.
His solutions to instilling a radical democratic ethos were certainly original, if not downright controversial. One of his later books, An American Utopia, holds up the US Army as a model of socialist dual power and starting point for mass democracy:
So the first step in my utopian proposal is, so to speak, the renationalization of the army along the lines of any number of other socialist candidates for nationalization (some of which I mentioned above), by reintroducing the draft to transform the present armed forces back into that popular mass force capable of coexisting successfully with an increasingly unrepresentative ‘representative government,’ and transforming it into a vehicle for mass democracy rather than the representative kind.
It is, needless to say, a provocative take. Some might read Jameson’s lauding of this “universal army” as out-of-step with the Left’s anti-militarism. He never suggests that this army would look anything like the current American one, with its outward disdain for just about any democratic norms, its violent machismo, and, more recently, its teeming with white supremacists. Rather, he looks with great interest at the historical peculiarities of the American military.
“[F]or in America,” he writes, “wars are the moral equivalent of collective action.” He’s not entirely wrong to point to World War II and the Popular Front as an example, taking into consideration the laboring of American culture that came with it. At the same time, Jameson references the draft as a key rallying point for opposition to American empire during the Vietnam years. By this token, we can also point to the anti-war GI movement – ranging from troops coming home to join the demonstrations to shooting a commanding officer – as being spurred by particular class formations of the military itself.
Though it may start in the conservative, hierarchy of the modern army, it is a model that relies, crucially, on transformation, on dialectical pivots from the fissures in our current reality. Jameson’s universal army is not one taking orders to slaughter brown kids halfway around the world, but of a whole subaltern polis mobilized around a common ideal of equality and mass democracy. Not unlike the National Guards of the Paris Commune, or the anti-fascist International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War.
There are plenty of reasons to disagree with the conclusions asserted here. But a generous reading would be to understand his entire argument as a reflection of Jameson’s socialism: far-reaching, thoroughgoing, unafraid to look for solutions through unorthodox angles, unsatisfied with building at the margins, dedicated to transforming everything from art to work to Engels’ infamous “bodies of armed men.”
Above all else, it is a socialism that rejects shallowness, that sees the world around us as made of moving parts full of possibility. It takes nothing for granted, and refuses to confuse appearance with truth. It is a socialism of active political engagement and dynamic cultures that, in self-renewing turn, demand participation. Life as a collective project, complicated and vivid, pushing through shared pain rather than avoiding it, all for the knowledge that there’s something better on the other side. It is several worlds away from the passive excuses for democracy and mass culture we’re forced to live with now, and it has little time for your silly vibes.
Header image is Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980), which features on the cover of Jameson’s Postmodernism.