Rather than reading this version which is a draft, you can download the corrected and cleaned up text of all the annotations and my introduction to them here now called, "One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx".
This article is quite dense with interesting insights, too dense perhaps to adequately cover all that it does. Jameson by looking at a critique of Proudhon by Marx in the Grundrisse. Proudhon or his followers had advocated abolishing money. Marx found this suggestion misguided because it failed to recognize that the substitute suggested “work-time coupon” would then “simply turn back into money itself” (278). That is, they had failed to grasp that “the very contradiction of the exchange system that is objectified and expressed in money proper” would be left untouched, and thus would be expressed and objectified in whatever took the place of money (278). Jameson’s next claim might be somewhat startling for some. Apropos the above, he claims “[s]o also with the attempt to separate ideology and reality” (278). That is, if we think of the ideology of the market, the ideology of, rather than the market per se, we err if we imagine that this ideology is merely “some supplementary ideational or representational luxury or embellishment” which could simply set aside in order to focus on the market without distraction (278). This ideology of the market is “generated by the thing itself, as its objectively necessary after-image” and so, to think clearly about the “market” at all, we must think these two aspects together “in their identity as well as in their difference” (278). Of these two dimensions he remarks that we must think of them as being “semi-autonomous” so long as we understand that term to signify that “they are not really autonomous or independent from each other, but they are not really at one with each other, either” (279). In Jameson’s reading “ideology was always meant to respect and to rehearse and flex the paradox of the mere semi-autonomy of the ideological concept” (279). What we cannot do, if we wish to think ideology is a meaningful fashion is to let the concept slide into putative autonomy and think it as simply epiphenomenal to “reality” (279). Returning to the ideology of the market, Jameson notes that both Marx and Milton Friedman both recognize that the rhetoric of market ideology stresses freedom and equality as values expressed therein, and that these values are “real and objective” and generated by the market system, but that in practice both thinkers (and Jameson) recognize that what results is unfreedom and inequality (279). Jameson likens the Proudhonists to Habermasians in that both assume that “freedom and equality - are properties of real societies” and that we all recognize their lack in the market system requires that we restore to “reality” (the reality of the market system we function within) the ideals that it espouses (280). What such a perspective fails to recognize is that these values, freedom and equality, are “profoundly imaginary in a real and positive sense” by which he means they exist as an image whose “very unreality and unrealizability being what is real about it” (280). The system depends upon these values as images of its promise, but precludes their being actually embodied. As such, Jameson argues that the only way to realize them would be through the dissolution of the market system itself (280). To think ideology as Jameson suggests, to “restore to ‘ideology’ this complex way of dealing with its roots in its own social reality would mean reinventing the dialectic, something that every generation fails to do in its own way” (280). He notes that the current generation has not even attempted such a thing and that the last attempt was made by Althusser (280-1).
Jameson also considers “so-called discourse theory” (281) which he sees as having attempted to step into the place of ideology critique, but while it allows its practitioners to “practice ideological analysis without calling it that” it functions to autonomize “the dimension of the /concept/” and call this “discourse” (282). Jameson sees this move as roughly the same error made by the Proudhonists.
Returning again to market ideology, Jameson offers the following thesis: “the rhetoric of the market has been a fundamental and central component of (...) [the] struggle for the legitimation or delegitimation of left discourse” (281). Noting that many on the left now say that “no society can function efficiently without the market” and who no longer have faith in the nationalization of the means of production, poses the situation of the contemporary postmodern left as espousing a socialism that “really has nothing to do with socialism itself any longer” (281). As such what must be analyzed and overturned is the contention that “[t]he market is in human nature” (281). This struggle he feels to be “the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time” (281). Politics of a certain sort cannot be excluded from ideological critique “not merely because ‘values’ as such have deeper class and unconscious sources than those of the conscious mind but also because theory is itself a kind of form determined by social content” (282). Neither Marxism nor socialism are in Jameson’s view political per se, both “[presuppose] the end of a certain political thinking” (283). He notes a similarity at this level between Marxism and Neoliberalism in that both think that “political philosophy is worthless” and are focused on the economy, as such they have “much in common (...) in fact virtually everything - save the essentials!” (283). Where Marxists would be concerned with people attempting to create a system that achieves certain social ends, the Neoliberal versions of politics “means simply the care and feeding of the economic apparatus” (283). He interrogates the notion of the “free market” observing that, there is no such market actually existing anywhere, and that even in the restricted realm of consumer choice, where we are told again and again that we are free, that we can hardly be said to choose what we consumer, rather we can choose amongst what is offered (283). Freedom of choice here being reduced to the option of Coke or Pepsi. Jameson is interested in how the rhetoric of market ideology has changed “from that of the conceptuality of production to that of distribution and consumption” even if in its material practices it “rarely seems in fact to do” (284). He then brings up the “crucial matter of property” and the many difficulties that conservatives have had with “‘the justification of original property titles’” (284) and whose position on this matter is a mere “synchronic framing” which actively “excludes the dimension of history and systemic historical change” (284).
Turning again to the question of the market and human nature, Jameson considers the work of Gary Becker in his book An Economic Approach to Human Behavior, where Becker offers a market analysis of marriage and an analysis of the household on the model of the firm. Jameson is willing to accept this analysis and sees it as in accord with Maxr’s view on temporality, which holds that “all value is a matter of time” (285). Jameson argues that this analysis is consonant with a great deal of contemporary theory in that it expands the range of behaviors considered to be “rational” (285). He goes on to argue that in our society that what counts as “irrational” has shrunk nearly to nothing, such that we now understand even those behaviors that we do not condone, such as torture or the destabilizing of other nations, etc (286). Given this shrink of the irrational though he wonders whether with such an “expanded concept of Reason” whether Reason can any longer have a “normative value” (286). Thinking then of Becker and the goal of rationalizing “human behavior” using a market analysis Jameson suggests that we have arrived at the postmodern, “a world peculiarly without transcendence and without perspective” though he notes that Becker’s thinking on these issues falls short of that point, in that it remains focused on production rather than consumption (286). But he claims that the “Becker model is postmodern ion its structure as a transcoding: two separate explanatory systems are combined here by way of the assertion of a fundamental identity (...): human behavior (...) on the one hand, the firm or enterprise, on the other” (287). Jameson faults Becker for assuming that because the metaphor produces results, that we are thereby entitled to revert to the literal level, where, presumably one would then reason about household matters or marriage bonds economically with the metaphorical somehow dropping away (287). In such ways of thinking “we have a welcome reduction of the old-fashioned subject (or individual, or ego), who is now little more than a point of consciousness directed on the stockpile of materials available in the outside world” and making decisions which are deemed to be rational “in the new enlarged sense of what any other human being could understand” (287-8).
Again bring this back to the ideology of the market, Jameson argues that “the market was indeed always political” and that “‘market ideology’, has less to do with consumption than it has to do with government intervention” (288). He locates the effectivity of the notion of the market “in its ‘totalizing’ structure (...) its capacity to afford a model of a social totality” (289). “Market ideology assures us that human beings make a mess of it when they try to control their destinies (‘socialism is impossible’) and that we are fortunate in possessing an impersonal mechanism - the market - which can substitute” (290). The market thus becomes like God, something in which we are enjoined to simply trust to do as it will. He then discusses what strikes him as the most unlikely of developments, that what most social agents recognize about the market system - its ruthlessness, dreariness and “Dickensian flavor” (291) should have been successfully given a make-over such that it has “proved to be sexy” (292). He attributes this to the effective merger of the market system with the media such that “two system of codes are identified in such a way as to allow the libidinal energies of one to suffuse the other, without (...) producing a synthesis” (292). This process and what he calls the “the consumption of the very process of consumption itself” (as when audiences are riveted by shows like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”) “allows a bridge to be made to fantasy-images of the ‘market in general’ or ‘the market as a unified process’” (293). In this situation “the media, [by] which the market was itself fantasized, now return into the market and, by becoming a part of it, seal and certify the formerly metaphorical or analogical identification [of the market ideology] as a ‘literal’ reality” (294). But given what both leftists (Marx) and conservatives (Friedman) recognize that the freedom and equality of the market is unrealizable as such within its domain “the ‘market’ itself turns out finally to be as Utopian as socialism has recently been held to be” (295).
No comments:
Post a Comment
lay it on me/us