jameson adorno

Jameson's Adorno, or, the Persistence of the UtopianAuthor(s): John PizerSource: New German Critique, No. 58 (Winter, 1993), pp. 127-151Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488391 .Accessed: 27/09/2013 14:43

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Jameson's Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Utopian

John Pizer

Fredric Jameson's 1990 monograph on Theodor W. Adomo, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic has generally met with harsh criticism ever since it first appeared. Peter Osborne's article, published recently in this journal, takes Jameson to task for willfully misappropriating and talsely characterizing Adomo's dominant epistemological categories (non-identity, mimesis, natural history, etc.) in the service of a single-minded attack on poststructuralist thought. In attempting to translate these conceptual constellations into an ideolect useful to his own unique project of creating a postmodemist Marxism, Jameson misconstrues Adorno's dialectic. As this negative dialectic was inscribed with a resistance to the sort of hegemonic programs es- poused by theorists such as Jameson, Jameson's attempted assimilation of Adorno to his particular priorities ironically acts to undercut his own theoretical premises.' In earlier reviews, Eva Geulen accused Jame- son of suppressing Adorno's conscious employment of a fragmentary writing style and his positing of unresolvable antinomies, a suppression motivated by Late Marxism's striving after totalities,2 and Robert Hullot- Kentor launched a blistering sarcastic attack against what he believes is Jameson's facile "commonsensicalness" in this book, an approach incapable of articulating Adorno's immanent critical method.3

The antagonism directed against Jameson's book by these and other

1. Peter Osborne, "A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson's Adorno," New Ger- man Critique 56 (Spring/Summer 1992): 171-92.

2. Eva Geulen, "A Matter of Tradition," Telos 89 (Fall 1991): 155-66 3. Robert Hullot-Kentor, "Suggested Reading: Jameson on Adorno," Telos 89 (Fall

1991): 167-77.

127


128 Jameson's Adorno

Adorno scholars is far from untounded. Jameson's relation to Adorno is itself marked by a rather antagonistic form of influence, and thus Late Marxism must inevitably provoke displeasure in Adorno's adherents. The purpose of my article is not primarily to defend Jameson against these attacks, nor to add my voice to the critical chorus, although I would say that one should not expect dispassionate scholarly analysis from a writer such as Jameson, with his own strongly demarcated theoretical and political agenda. This agenda is consistent with the book's central premise, namely, that Adorno was tundamentally a Marxist theoretician. If one was to study Adorno's oeuvre without prior reference to the voluminous secondary literature of which Adorno has been the focus in the last two decades, this proposition might seem rather obvious. However, many interpreters have attempted to transform Adorno into a late "Young He- gelian," a neo-poststructuralist, a forerunner of new historicism, or whatever else might fit someone's own particular critical priority. Jameson's book is in large measure a dialogue with and a retutation of these writers.

One of Jameson's own most persistent critical priorities has been the elucidation of the utopian. It is perhaps the domain (or sphere of ideological discourse) most powerfully and frequently exercised in his work. My essay seeks to demonstrate that Adorno has consistently played the key (albeit largely hidden and conflicted) role in Jameson's treatment of this domain. Jameson's articulation of the utopian is closely related to his nearly instinctual tendency to analyze discursive realms as totalities, and here, too, Adorno's role is "critical" in both senses of the term; it is both seminal and largely oppositional. As Cornel West has noted:

Adorno presents Jameson with his most formidable challenge, for Adorno's delicate dialectical acrobatics embark on the quest for totalization while simultaneously calling such a quest into question; theyv reconstruct the part in light of the whole; they devise a complex conception of mediation while disclosing the idea of to- talitv as illusion; and they ultimately promote dialectical development while surrendering to bleak pessimism about ever attaining a desirable telos. In short, Adorno is a negative hermeneutical thinker, a dialectical deconstructionist par excellence: the skeleton that forever hangs in Jameson's closet.4

West's analysis trenchantly summarizes the way in which Adorno's

4. Cornel West, "Ethics and Action in Fredric Jameson's Marxist Hermeneutics," Postmodernism and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 125.


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thought constitutes the chief obstacle to Jameson's attempted evocation of totalities. But West fails to note the tremendously productive results of Adorno's challenge; it is precisely Adorno's sobering influence which prevents Jameson from engaging in the "utopianism gone mad" West mistakenly identifies in his work.5 We will see that Jameson's Adorno reception yields insights not merely into his own complex views on the utopian, but into the thought of Adorno as well. While Jameson's formulations of utopia and totality are enriched and problematized through the mediation of Adorno, Adorno's own positions on these constructs are shown in Jameson's reading to be more complex and ambivalent than most of his interpreters have realized. For example, Jameson's unique perspectives will allow us to see Martin Jay's assertion that "totality" for Adorno "is retained only as a term of oppro- brium to indicate the pervasive domination of power relations that can only be challenged on the local and particular level,"6 an assertion not unusual in Adorno scholarship, as an oversimplification.

Jameson's first in-depth analysis of Adorno's thought is to be found in his essay "T. W. Adorno; or, Historical Tropes," which originally appeared in the Spring 1967 issue of Salmagundi, but is better known as the introductory essay toJameson's book Marxism and Form (1971). The opening line of this essay pithily evokes the dilemma which has consistently compelled Jameson's quest to identify the utopian, collective impulse in the realm of art, namely, its virtual absence from the contemporary, sociopolitical sphere: "To whom can one present a writer whose principal subject is the disappearance of the public?" (MF 3).7

5. West 140. West objects to Jameson's association, in The Political Unconscious, of even upper class solidarity with collective, utopian impulses, seeing therein a horribly misguided optimism. ButJameson's identification of a utopian collectivity in the class consciousness of the privileged and powerful is not a reflection of optimism. He merely attempts to establish a striking and unexpected (i.e. dialectically mediated) genealo- gy, in the manner of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Adorno.

6. Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia UP) 135.

7. References to Jameson's books are given parenthetically in the text. MF = Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971); PH = The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972); FA = Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979); PU = The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Social- lv Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981); Essays 1 = The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971- 1986 Volume 1: Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988); Essays 2 = The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986. Volume 2: The Syntax of History (Minneapolis: U of Min- nesota P, 1988); LM = Late Marxism: Adorno, or. The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990); PM = Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(Durham: Duke UP, 1991).



By "the public," Jameson would signify a communal totality, a cohe- sive group drawn together by mutual affiliations. His sense of the loss of such a public is even more pronounced in his book, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic oJ Late Capitalism (1991), where the classes which had heretofore constituted specific public domains are shown to have dissolved (at least in the United States, and, to some degree, in the Western world in general) into a plethora of highly disparate micro- political interest groups.

Particularly among composers (and it is Adorno's writing on music which serves as the focus oftJameson's early essay), Adorno saw a similar dissolution of class distinctions. Earlier class distinctions had led to collective production, in contrast to the individualism oft composers in the Schonberg era. But this homogenization of the classes can in no way obviate the endangered social position of the composer, who is increasingly cut off from societal wealth.8 The reason for the composers' growing impoverishment seems to lie in that vanishing of a coherent and identifiable public which Jameson sees as constituting the basic theme of Adorno's work. Adorno's pessimism as to the results of this disappearance, not unlike Jameson's, is tied in his work largely to the evisceration of collective social memory and historical consciousness through the process of reification in late capitalism.9 It serves to spur Jameson (as it did Benjamin in the phenomenal world, to Adorno's ultimate irritation) to identity the traces of social coherence and totality wherever he can find them; this is the basis of West's objection to Jameson's praxis.

Adorno objects to the articulation of a social totality because he associates this concept with identitarian thinking. As Jameson himself remarks, Adorno's negative dialectic claims that "the whole is the untrue" (PU 54). It is untrue with respect to the social because it presupposes a false telos, a chimeric end point in history toward which the collective is seen, reductively, to move. Adorno emphatically rejected the Hegelian principle of expressive totality, prompted by Lukdics and

8. Theodor W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: Zwdlf theoretische Vorlesungen (Munich: Rowohlt, 1968) 198-99.

9. This process, and this "late" phase of capitalism, are identified by Adorno as al- ready predominant in the late nineteenth century. See, for example, his essay "lOber epische Naivet&" in Noten zur Literatur I (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1980) 50-60. In his 1977 essay "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan," Jameson judges the Frankfurt School's convincing analysis of the variegated instrumentalities through which the subject becomes reified under late capitalism to be its "lasting achievement" (Essays 1, 109).


John Pizer 131

most other left Hegelians, for its positing of a meta-subject which makes reality a totality, and thus reduces its discrete phenomena to mere sub-elements in an identitarian ever-the-same.

This rejection of the meta-subject as the agent of social totality leads Adorno, in the Negative Dialektik (1966), to question the ideology behind the postulation of a "progressive class."'0 As Susan Buck-Morss has noted, Adorno lelt the individual microcosmically mirrored the social totality, but disputed social analyses by both the left and the right when the articulation of such a whole itself became a critical focus. The "collective" as a concept is too closely imbricated with the commodity character of bourgeois society, a character which (as Luk~ics indicated and as Adorno concurred), constitutes this society's "objective reality.""1 Such views inevitably pose a dilemma for Jameson, for whom the evocation of the social collective, or at least a communal totality, is virtually synonymous with the utopian moment in the aesthetic realm.

Nevertheless, it is in the aesthetic realm that Jameson and Adorno may be said to meet. For particularly in modem music, Adomo sustains the notion of aesthetic totality as a mode of resistance to social and ma- terial totality. The "integral technique" of modern musical compo- sition poses through its objective character a moment of resolute opposition to the integral state, and helps to absorb the tear generated by the social totality in this, its concrete, philosophical, objectively exist- ent character.12 This reassurance helps the subject to "win back its self- determination."'s For Jameson as well, the artwork constitutes the locus of subjective integrity and empowerment. However, here too there is a frisson between Adorno and Jameson. For while Jameson analyses literary works in The Political Unconscious (1981) in terms of their concrete visions of projected utopian moments, as sites of embedded utopian images which he attempts to distill, Adorno's consistent reservations concerning the utopian are closely related to his adherence to a Bilder- verbot, his disinclination to see the utopian evoked directly (without critical intervention) through aesthetic representations. As we will see, Adorno believed that the moment of freedom embedded in the utopian

10. Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukdcs to Habermas (Berke- ley: U of California P, 1984) 259.

11. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977) 28 and 58. 12. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949, rpt.Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1978)

125. 13. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, 113.



can only be grasped through determinate negation. Determinate negation, the practice of elucidating the specific antinomies in aesthetic and social phenomena, alone allows art to achieve its (utopian) projection of reconciliation; this is a central postulate of Adorno's Asthetische Theorie (1970). These differences inevitably burden Jameson with great diffi- culties in his attempt to adapt Adorno to his own utopian project.

Jameson's essay on Adorno in Marxism and Form is most famous for its characterization of the Negative Dialektik as "in the long run a massive failure" (MF 58), ajudgment he would come to modify. Jameson's indictment stems at least partially from his early view of Adorno as a distinctly anti-utopian thinker (though, in the same breath with which he terms Adorno's magnum opus a failure, he cannot resist seeing it as indicative "of that genuine totality of thought which Adorno's works taken as a whole embody" [MF 58]). This is not to say that Jameson, in this early analysis, finds no trace of the utopian in Adorno's thought. He perceives in Adorno's well-known projection of a conceivable subject-object reconciliation a construct which could regress into a naive utopianism if transposed into the historical plane. However, Jameson argues that Adorno obviates this possibility by situating his concept of Versohnung (albeit diachronically, in connection with the personage of Beethoven) in the domain of art (MF 38-39).

Other essays in Marxism and Form discern a utopian impulse in figures as disparate as Schiller, LukAcs, Breton, Bloch, Benjamin and Marcuse. But Jameson sees Adorno's constant awareness of reification and con- tradiction in artistic production in the present age as blocking the genuine evocation of the utopian even in his aesthetic writings. He implies that this is a critical failure in Adorno's thought, for Marxism and Form views the utopian as a fundamentally negational principle. The utopian is an allegorical frame which itself allegorizes the world and allows us to see the massive totality of the here and now as not fixed and final, but subject to dialectical reversal through imaginative aesthetic projection. Particularly Ernst Bloch causes Jameson to see the utopian moment as structured by allegory, for the utopian can never express itself directly. It calls on the subject for creative contemplation, according to Bloch's aesthetic (MF 142). Such an endeavor is not to be seen as a form of escapism, but as a means to perceive the labile and contingent character of current social reality.

Although Jameson regards Adorno's discoveries concerning the all- encompassing reitication of the subject in the age of late capitalism as his signal achievement, he believes such a desultory preoccupation


John Pizer 133

blocks the potential for a genuinely liberating "negative dialectic," in the form of utopian allegory, from realizing itself in Adorno's book. It can only negate the negative and contradict the contradictory, thus becoming at once reductive, fragmenting and tautological (see esp. MF 56-59).

In spite of Marxism and Form's ultimate condemnation of Adorno's late work for its supposed failure to see the emancipatory potential of the utopian allegoric, Jameson was aware early on that the utopian impulse was a significant component of Adorno's thought. In the 1977 essay "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan," for example, he spoke of the construction by Adorno and Horkheimer of "a new Utopian vision of bonheur and instinctual gratification" (Essays 1, 79). Libidinal fulfillment plays a constitutive role in Jameson's own articulation of utopian struc- tures in works of art as well, particularly in such modern genres as science fiction (MF 405-07 and Essays 1, 14-16). But Jameson goes on to note that "the Frankfurt School's powerfiul vision of a liberated collective culture tends to leave little space for the unique histories - both psychic and social - of individual subjects" (Essays 1, 80). Marxism and Form would lead us to believe that the blame for this failing should not be laid at the feet of the Frankfurt School, but must be regarded as rooted in a general epistemological aporia of modernity, when and where the discontinuity between individual and collective experience is heightened to such a degree that it is surmounted only in the artistic utopian vision itself.14

There is nevertheless a significant disjunction in the works of Jameson and Adorno with regard to the individual in his/her relationship to the collective totality in a projected utopian realm. Drawing on sources as diverse as Althusser's and Lacan's constellations of the Imaginary, Habermas' communicational models and (through dialectical reversal) Thomas More's dystopian pessimism, Jameson has consistently attempted to conceptualize the promise of a collectivity which liberates the individual, allowing him or her the freedom to pursue genuine self-tulfill- ment. For Adorno, "freedom can only be grasped in determinate negation, in accordance with the concrete shape of unfreedom."'5 This is

14. However, he felt Sartre was able to make a cognitive "leap" between the two realms. See MF 347.

15. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1970) 228. Adorno is more pessimistic than Jameson as regards the dissolution of the discrete subject in the age of late capitalism. See Hans-Hartmut Kappner, "Adomos Reflexionen fiber den Zerfall des biirgerlichen Individuums," Text + Kritik. Sonderband: Theodor W Adorno, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1977) 44-63.



an example of the contemporaneously synthesizing and self-canceling operations, and the destructive but also sell-destructive treatment of hypostatic concepts Marxism and Form tound so deeply troubling (albeit fascinating) in Negative Dialektik. Undoubtedly, Adorno's elision of individual freedom from the (rare) moments of utopian consciousness in this work played a major role in creating Jameson's early discomfort with it.

Jameson's next major work, The Prison-House of Language (1972), con- tains few direct references to Adorno, as it is concerned almost exclu- sively with the developmental tendencies of the Russian formalist and structuralist movements. Nevertheless, striking assertions in this book which one might find somewhat odd it not regarded as fully consistent and integral to his praxis, such as his comment that "structuralism may be understood as a distorted awareness of the dawning collective character of life" (PH 196), are valuable in their demonstration of a continuity, and further development, in Jameson's ongoing constellation of the utopian, the collective, and the totality. Jameson's search for a reconciliation of synchronic, diachronic and hermeneutic planes in the structuralist enterprise at the conclusion to this book indicates his striving for totality even as a technique of critical thought itself (PH 214-16). The attainment of such a comprehensive methodology would naturally subtend an insight into the often invisible nexus extrinsically and intrinsically linking the socio-economic sphere to the cultural-aesthetic domain (the "base" in its relationship to the "superstructure"), and would see the work of art as a synchronic register of its political and historical site of origin.

Both Jameson and Adorno are even more resolute than LukAcs in their pursuit of such interdisciplinary associations. With regard to Jameson, this tendency first becomes strikingly manifest in his next major book, The Political Unconscious (1981). But the profound influence Adorno exercised on this work is actually indicated by a passage at the outset of the Adorno essay in Marxism and Form:

(Thus) the full-scale study of superstructures, the construction of the historical trope, not to lyrical but rather to extended and epic proportions, presupposes a transcendence of the atomistic nature of the cultural term: it is essentially the difference between the juxtaposition of an individual novel against its socio-economic back- ground, and the history of the novel seen against this same back- ground. (MF 9-10, Jameson's emphasis)


John Pizer 135

This insight is inspired by Jameson's reading of Adorno's Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949), in which he admires the bringing into play of "a network of cross-relationships" drawn from seemingly disparate dis- cursivities (MF 8). His subsequent remark shows he quickly grasped the possibilities of creating such a network in the domain of the theory of the novel, and this possibility was realized some fourteen years later in The Political Unconscious.

In between Marxism and Form and The Political Unconscious, Jameson published a book probably more familiar, because of its restricted topic, to those who study English literature than to Germanists and those who work in the general area of critical theory. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979) reveals some interesting developments in Jameson's reception of Adorno, and in his views on the utopian element in the theory of the Frankfurt School. Adorno privileged modernist works of art as the last outposts of resistance to the totalizing conjunctions of a hegemonic "culture industry." The reifications of this industry transform certain ideological categories into dominant constructs in the sphere of mass culture in a manner Adorno and Horkheimer saw as linking it to Nazism and fascism. The title of Jameson's book would seem to indicate a decisive break with the Frankfurt School, since it implies that modernism may be assimi- lated by fascism rather than resisting it. Of course, given what is often seen as the anti-hegemonic and polysemic character of works of art associated with postmodernism, Adorno's view of modernism as a final refuge of aesthetic alterity has led many, including Jameson, to conclude that Adorno's modernist aesthetics are somewhat anachronistic.'6 But Jameson actually draws on the Frankturt School to defend Lewis' signifi- cance (and thus his own choice of Lewis as the subject of a book-length monograph) when he cites a theorem of the Frankfurt School, which he would come, in Late Marxism, to associate specifically with the individual figure of Adorno: ". .. the continuing vitality of Lewis' work confirms the proposition of the Frankfurt School that the aesthetic value of works of art is directly proportional to their systematic formal repudiation of the fallen world of empirical being, of reified appearance and of the status quo" (FA 19). Jameson's move to corroborate this central dictum of

16. A striking exception to this tendency is evident in Albrecht Wellmer's study, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne: Vernunftkritik nach Adorno (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1985), which makes frequent use of Adorno's dialectics in Wellmer's own dialectic mediation of these two movements.



the Frankfurt School in order to tacitly defend his own elucidation of utopian resistance in otherwise prototascist or at least resolutely class- biased works of art will be repeated in The Political Unconscious, we will see, and shows an extremely shrewd grasp of the global implication of the Frankfurt School's latent utopian impulse, a hidden comprehen- siveness (or "totality") inherent in the applicability of its aesthetic principles most critics tend to overlook.

A later passage in Fables of Aggression builds on Jameson's adumbra- tion, in the essay on Lacan, of the overtly libidinal element in the Frank- furt School's utopian conjectures. In the earlier work, Jameson showed how the utopian was evoked as libidinal satisfaction through a negative dialectical inversion (Essays 1, 79-80). In Fables oJAggression, Jameson defines this operation more clearly in bringing Roland Barthes' concept of mod- ernistic stasis ("suspension") into contiguity with the negative dialectical invocation of the utopian by Adorno and his colleagues:

By this suspension, in which representation undermines itself, modernism hopes to preserve and to keep open the space of some genuine Experience beyond reification, the space of that libidinal and Utopian gratification of which the Frankfurt School speaks, a space in which ihe failure of imagination, canceled by the form itself, can then release the imaginary to some more intense second- degree fulfillment and narrative figuration. (FA 171)

Drawing on Barthes to show how modernism subverts representa- bility - a subversion Jameson has indicated elsewhere is motivated by modernism's reaction to the overdetermined manipulation of and ex- cessive reliance on the representational by the naturalist movement - he also allows us to see why Adorno and his colleagues were drawn to modernist works in projecting their own conjectures and conjurations of the utopian. As Buck-Morss has observed, Adorno always insisted that the "nonidentity" between subject and object, word and thing, re- main a tixed part of philosophical consciousness; this is the foundation for any genuine "hope for utopia."''7 Jameson indicates that the under- mining of representation unique to (or at least most strongly manifest in) the modernist movement established it as the tundamental aesthetic nexus from which Adorno and the Frankturt School could draw in evoking a utopian space resolutely tied to the principle of non-identity.

As Jameson emphasizes, the Frankturt School believed the crutch of visual immediacy had to be knocked away trom the imagination it it


John Pizer 137

was to project a conceptual domain of satisfaction and release, and thus approximate the utopian. Adorno's most striking association of the path to the utopian with the negation of imagistic plenitude occurs in a refutation, in Minima Moralia (1951), of Max Scheler's epistemo- logy's, and not in any overt valorization of modernism. Nevertheless, Jameson makes it possible for us to see the, consistency in Adomo's adherence to a Bilderverbot in his musings on the future on the one hand, and in his modernist aesthetics on the other.

The Political Unconscious enacts Jameson's most famous, most comprehensive and exemplary search for traces of the yearning for collective totality and utopian cohesion in the deep structure of literary works. As Comel West's misguided barb about "utopianism gone mad" in this book suggests, and as Fables of Aggression anticipates, Jameson turns up this impulse in the most unlikely of places. Jameson does not believe literature is simply a register or repository for this cathected desire; he sees it as a movens of narrative itself, its latent political agency. Thus Jameson borrows but expands on the implications of Luk~cs' concept of "totality" in literature, to the point where he finds that, to quote Jer- ry Aline Flieger, "a text's 'unconscious' political mission is primarily a collective or social function, rather than a process of communication of autonomous individual subjects."'9Jameson and Adorno were both influenced by Lukics' theory of the reitication and dissolution of autonomous individual subjective identity, which was elucidated in Geschichte und KlassenbewujStsein (1923). However, they are tar less in- clined than Lukacs to foreground the literary markers of individual protagonists' resistance to this process.20

Jameson discusses Adorno only sparingly in The Political Unconscious, but makes two rather striking comments on, respectively, the concepts of totality and utopia in Adorno's thought. He balances his strong valorization of methodological totality with an acknowledgment of the value in poststructuralist attention to textual discontinuity and fragmentation,

17. Buck-Morss 90. 18. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschiidigten Leben (Franfurt/M.: Suhr-

kamp, 1951) 378-79. 19. Jerry Aline Flieger, "The Prison-House of Ideology: Critic as Inmate," Diacritics

12 (Fall 1982): 50. 20. Cf. William C. Dowling, Jameson, Althusser. Marx: An Introduction to 'The Political Un-

conscious' (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984). Dowling believes Jameson's book, like LukAcs' essays on realism and other earlier Marxist criticism, "obliquely honors individual identity by regarding social classes like the bourgeoise and the proletariat as 'collective characters' within that 'story' or salvational account of history told by Marx" (92-93).



citing his own work as an example of how these seeming procedural oppositions can be reconciled. But he is also at pains to show how even the most radically anti-"totalitarian" poststructuralists, such as Deleuze and Derrida, ground their work in an underlying structural unity. He uses Adorno's negative dialectics as both an example and a technique to show how poststructuralist theories ultimately presuppose a cognitive totality:

We will therefore suggest that these are second-degree or critical philosophies, which reconfirm the status of the concept of totality by their very reaction against it; such a movement is worked out even more explicitly in Adomo's 'negative dialectic,' with its counteraffirmation - 'the whole is the untrue' - in which the classical dialectic seeks, by biting its own tail, to deconstruct itself. (PU 53-54)

This bringing of Adorno into contiguity with deconstruction is not unique; in Late Marxism, Jameson will object to a similar move by other writers who are more closely identified with deconstruction than he is. What is more significant here is a slight shift inJameson's own attitude towards Negative Dialektik. He once again stresses what he finds to be the inherently self-canceling, self-de(con)structive operation in Adorno's procedure. However, his explicit suggestion that it counter-intuitively revalidates the principle of totality positions him to draw on Adorno more directly in later works to defend the (in Jameson's work) closely related ideals of methodological totality and the critical evocation in cultural artifacts of the collective utopian impulse.

There are moments in Adorno's oeuvre which tend to support Jameson's reversal. Adorno tells us in the Negative Dialektik, through a negative inversion of absolute idealism's dialectics, that the genuine comprehension of a thing (as opposed to the attempt to force its assimilation into a relational system) means the awareness of the individual moment in its immanent cohesion or connection (Zusammenhang) with other such moments. He then makes an approving reference to the "coherence of the non-identical,"'21 thereby evoking the conceptual

21. Adorno, Negative Dialektik 34. Jameson sees just such a coherence evoked in the oeuvre of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. He particularly credits Kluge with coheren- tly bringing together disparate individual events in his films and stories. Though Kluge's anecdotal fusion of idiosyncratic experience to collective history calls their connection into question, it also indicates that learning itself is an immanent, involuntary process


John Pizer 139

possibility of an intrinsic totality, a "second-degree" promise of- underly- ing, systemic unification. It is precisely such immanent impulses of totality, of collective utopian cohesion, which Jameson discovers in the narratives examined in The Political Unconscious. By reading Adorno "against the grain" as an ally in this quest, Jameson allows us to examine the critical presuppositions of works such as Negative Dialektik with a heightened awareness of their antinomies.

Jameson's subtle appropriation of Adorno as an authorizing voice for the evocation of utopian desire on a global scale (and thus even in prototascist cultural artifacts) in Fables of Aggression becomes more explicit in The Political Unconscious. After drawing on the more obvious example of Ernst Bloch's Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1959), in which even advertise- ments are shown to reflect (in an albeit manipulative manner) the most deep-seated utopian instincts, Jameson argues that the Dialectic of En- lightenment (1944) has an agenda similar to Bloch's, although it is less well-recognized:

As for the influential Adorno-Horkheimer denunciation of the 'culture industry,' this same Utopian hermeneutic - implicit in their system as well - is in their Dialectic of Enlightenment obscured by an embattled commitment to high culture; yet it has not suffi- ciently been noticed that it has been displaced to the succeeding chapter of that work, where a similar, yet even more difficult analysis is undertaken, in which one of the ugliest of all human passions, anti-Semitism, is shown to be profoundly Utopian in character, as a form of cultural envy which is at the same time a repressed recogni- tion of the Utopian impulse. (PU 287-88)

Jameson's essay on "The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate" (1984) asserts that Adorno's investigations of high modernist culture were undertaken with the same will to reactualize and make manifest this culture's (equally well-hidden) "Utopian power" (Essays, 2 108). One might therefore conclude that, in principle, Jameson

process. The learning process adumbrated by Kluge is a becoming gradually aware of the competencies stored in the body, the collectivity, and the unconscious through the gradual amassment of just such non-identitical moments. The slogan used for this process is "relationality," a principle closely related to the concept of Zusammenhang as it is constellated in the cited passage of Negative Dialektik. Jameson also indicates that Adorno influenced Kluge's and Negt's "Lernprozesse" theorems. See Jameson, "On Negt and Kluge," October 46 (Fall 1988): 151-77, esp. 175-76.



sees in Adorno a kindred spirit, one who also searches "high and low" for the utopian impulse, despite his reservations about the self-canceling tendencies he finds in Adorno's dialectics. As we will see, this conclusion is somewhat contradicted by Jameson's dissatisfaction with Adorno's analysis of mass culture. Additionally, Adorno and Horkheimer had a much bleaker view of the dialectical flow of history than Jameson, who, it should go without saying, is no old-fashioned Marxian optimist in this regard. Thus, Adorno and.Horkheimer are as likely to associate the utopian with the (sometimes superticially) delusional as with a positive and powerful, latent collective yearning. In the same discussion of anti- Semitism in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment cited by Jameson, for example, Adorno and Horkheimer assert that reification has become so all-encompassing as to seem to the passive masses an inevitability.

Under such circumstances, all spontaneity, and indeed any glimmer of the real state of things must itselt become an "eccentric utopia."22 The notion that the thoroughness of reification in late capitalism has led all genuine insights into what lies behind the veil of Maya to appear to bear the character of delusional utopian thought is considerably gloomier than Jameson's own mediation between refication and utopia in The Political Un- conscious. Particularly in the chapter on Joseph Conrad (PU 206-80), Jameson argues that the utopian resonance in modernist literature (often unintentionally) serves to offset and negate the effects of a reification he finds almost as omnipresent as Adorno and Horkheimer. Modernism counters late capitalism's effacement of the historical, the sacred, the communal and the ancient by projecting a narrative space where these values can be registered and conflictually valorized. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the truth becomes the utopian through the distortional prism of society under the spell of an omnipotent reification, while Jameson articulates the utopian as an aesthetic refuge from this spell. This is an important difference to be sure. But for all three, the utopian is an interstice where the "Real," the "authentic," and the "undistorted" are manifested or at least where they can be imaginatively discerned.

We have just made reference to what is actually a barely perceptible distinction in the respective outlooks of-Jameson and Adorno regarding the universal character of reification, at least in the industrial (now

22. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufkldrung: Philosophische Fragmente, Gesammelte Schriflten, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1984) 231.


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increasingly "postindustrial") Western world. Since Adorno and Jameson share an obsession with this process more powerful than that of most Marxist critics (excepting Lukics, of course, who strongly influenced both of them in this regard), it can come as no surprise that reification is among the most powerful and striking themes in Late Marxism. In Marxism, reification is based on the distinction between use value and exchange value. According to classical Marxist analysis (particularly in its Luk~csian variant), capitalism's instantiation of exchange value as the exclusive foundation of its economic base has had the effect of turning all phenomena within the orbit of its superstructure, including people and art, into things, by causing them to be seen merely as potential commodities or producers of commodities. Adorno devoted a substantial portion of his work to examining the effects of this process in the age of late capitalism, and Jameson is certainly not the first of his interpreters to carefully analyze this aspect of his work.23 What is unique but characteristic in Jameson's approach is his drawing of reification and utopia in Adorno into the same constellation. For example, he quotes Adorno's pronouncement in Minima Moralia which defines fetishism as the asylum of the Other in the phenomenal world, the site where Adorno's "Utopia of the qualitative," (that which cannot be reduced to sameness by the system of exchange values), manifests itself. "In the same way," Jameson goes on to note in citing a passage from the Versuch iiber Wagner (1952), "the more familiar theme of reification is thus laid down: 'The more reification there is, all the more subjectivism will there be"' (LM 70). Jameson presupposes a ho- mologous relationship between these two assertions, but the homology seems invalid. For it is impossible to discern how Jameson makes the leap from fetishism to subjectivism in analyzing Adorno's concepts, un- less one makes the implausible assertion that Adorno saw the latter as the anthropological equivalent of the former.

In spite of its awkwardness, Jameson's striking juxtaposition of these passages does suggest how, for Adorno, reification leads the non-identical into retreat. The individual seeking respite from the relentless ever-the-same instantiated by the system of exchange value will find refuge in the (superficially discrete) interiority of subjectivism.24 What

23. For a particularly thoughtful examination of Adorno's views on reification, see Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia UP, 1978) 27-51.

24. This is indeed a central premise of Adorno's Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Asthetischen (1933).



Adorno poses as the alternative to the reitied is the unique, the individ- ualistic, the non-identical, and these qualities are associated in the domain of objects with "the Utopia of the qualitative." Jameson expresses discomfort with the very concept ot "non-identity" throughout the course of Late Marxism, preferring, for example, to call Adorno "the philosopher of Identity in a very special sense" (LM 15).

No doubt Jameson's uneasiness with this principle is largely motivated, as he implies, by the ease with which poststructuralists have been able to manipulate it in their writings on Adorno to claim his proxi- mity to their own perspectives. When Jameson goes on to assert that the anti-totalitarian and anti-utopian dimensions of current thought "must be sharply distinguished" from Adorno's opposition to the principle of identity (LM 22-23), we begin to see why Adorno is the "skeleton that forever hangs in Jameson's closet" (West). Jameson is capable of viewing the semi-autonomous aesthetic sphere, the "place of quality in an increasingly quantified world," and the distinctive in art as a "Utopian compensation" for grievances suffered by the psyche through reification (PU 236-37). But he is much more likely to associate the utopian with a kind of total, universal identity brought about through the final overcoming of social stratification, as is evident in the following passage from The Political Unconscious: "The achieved collectivity or organic group of whatever kind - oppressors fully as much as op- pressed - is Utopian not in itself, but only insotar as all such collecti- vities are themselvesfigures for the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopian or classless society" (PU 291, Jameson's emphasis). In other words, Jameson more often associates the utopian with social totality and collective identity than with the discrete and heteroge- neous in art. Thus, with regard to the relationship between utopia and identity, Jameson and Adorno are on opposite sides of the fence, and this is what justifies West's colortul description of Adorno as the haunt- ing specter among the plethora of thinkers present in Jameson's corpus.

Jameson's discomfort with Adorno's premises concerning the et- fects of reification in the aesthetic sphere, and with the absence in these premises of any positive mediation between the collective and the utopian, is even more evident in an earlier work, the essay "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" (1979). Jameson expresses admiration here for the Frankturt School's analysis of universal commodification in all areas of mass cultural life in the modern age, but feels its exclusive tocus on aesthetic modernism as the sole arena of resistance to this


John Pizer 143

process of reification - a resistance articulated by a hodgepodge of solitary artists and couched in so many idiosyncratic languages - ig- nores the collective utopian impulse in mass culture. His dissatisfaction with Adorno's conception of non-identity is simply the obverse side of this earlier critique of what he saw as the Frankfurt School's aesthetic elitism; both tendencies drive a wedge between the collective and the utopian, the yearning for which is one and the same in Jameson's view, and can be found in the modem cultural sphere in its totality, that is to say, in canonic works of modernism as well as in contemporary Hollywood films and pulp fiction.25

Jameson's view of Adorno's utopia concept as fundamentally divorced from all association with the communal sphere is the likely reason for Late Marxism's subtle implication that this concept is eviscerated and uncompelling in Adorno's oeuvre. For example, Jameson refers twice to the famous sun-bathing image in Minima Moralia's "Sur l'eau" aphorism, evocative of ultimate entropy and individual human stupor as the genuinely utopian telos of humanity (LM 101, 115). He also tends elsewhere to associate Adorno's utopia concept with individual corporeal gratification, or with negation, absence, stasis, transience, and nothing- ness, partly through his choice of citations (LM 102, 112, 218, 222).

On the surface, there does not appear to be a substantial difference in perspective between this representation of Adorno's utopian impulse and that of, say, Buck-Morss, who links this impulse to Adorno's embrace of the principle of non-identity and finds a tendency (under Benjamin's influence) in Adomo's work to seek the utopian in seemingly marginal phenomena, allowing its presence to manifest itself all the more powerfully through dialectical contrast. But there is a big difference between seeing in Adorno's definition of art as the promesse de bonheur (a promise which rests upon the condition of formal totality) a suggestion of "false happiness" or "deceptive pleasure" (LM 146), and Buck-Morss' more upbeat assessment that art for Adorno was "the refuge for that utopian impulse which could find no home in present reality."26 When we add that Buck-Morss is usually far more direct than Jameson in connecting Adomo's notion of utopia with an adherence to a Bitder- verbot, two quite distinct conceptualizations of this principle emerge. In

25. Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 130-48.

26. Buck-Morss 170.



Late Marxism, Adorno's utopia is implicitly presented as a final stasis, while Buck-Morss' The Origin of Negative Dialectics associates this element in Adorno's writing not only with the not-yet, but with an unimagined, hidden and unimaginable (but not therefore "false") happiness.

Jameson finds a distinction between the dynamics of Adorno's exis- tential/metaphysical dialectic (and the Bilderverbot he associates with this dimension of Adomo's thought), and the corporeal satiety inscribed into the utopian image in "Sur l'eau" (LM 115). But Adorno's specific dialectical contrast in "Sur l'eau" emerges in a mediation of this image with "vulgar" Marxism's own utopian image of ceaseless and pointless collective activity, "collectivity as the blind rage of doing."27 Although Jameson's evocations of collective utopian engagement bear no trace of such unthinking, bestial turmoil, Adorno's seeming horror at traditional images of this realized socialism probably have much to do with Jameson's reservations about his negative dialectic. It was precisely because of Adorno's intransigence with regard to utopia in its mass dimension, connected to a rejection of Marxian ideological attempts "to project alternate futures" such as the beehive-like world evoked in "Sur I'eau," that Jameson -referred to this dialectic as a "late and desperate concept" in the course of his discussion of Manfredo Taturi's texts on architecture in the 1985 essay "Architecture and the Critique of Ideol- ogy" (Essays, 2 38). But Marxism and Form shows us that Jameson's dissatisfaction with the utopian in Adorno's thought does not lie in a per- ceived overemphasis on the individual shape of this impulse at the expense of conjuring its collective manifestation, but in a (somewhat his- torically inevitable) tailure to mediate between these two spheres.

Jameson's association of the utopian with an identitarian, collective impulse, with a nearly chthonic yearning rooted deeply in both the individual and society and manifested in all art, leads to a misreading of Adorno's mimesis concept in Late Marxism. His chapter on mimesis in this work opens with an assertion that mimesis can be connected to Benjamin's notion of "aura"; both are mystical constructs trapped (like Adorno's utopian concept itself) in the dialectic of the particular and the universal (LM 64). As Buck-Morss has noted, Benjamin's aura concept did indeed play a major role in inspiring Adorno's mimetic postulates; Benjamin's belief that literary translation imbued the origi- nal work with a truth-sustaining aura inspired Adorno to see musical

27. Adorno, Minima Moralia 296.


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reproduction through performance as a similarly authenticating mimetic practice. Buck-Morss also notes that Benjamin's articulation of a utopian "name" giving principle in prelapsarian language, which united word and thing in a relationship fully informed by immediacy, influenced Adorno to assimilate "the utopian elements of mimesis" with his later principle of reconciliation.28 Michael Cahn has also pointed out Benjamin's impact on Adorno's articulation of a mimetic language, but he indicates that Adorno rejected Benjamin's synthesizing tendencies. Mimetic language cannot be described, but only high- lighted as a figural trace in literature and art (as the promesse do bonheur). Adorno rejects Benjamin's name-giving language as an unrealizable utopian model, but the mimetic language of art is cast by Adorno as utopian in order to serve him as a counter concept by which to critique normative, everyday and philosophical language.29

Thus, as Cahn indicates, and contrary to Jameson's own utopian postulates, the utopian dimension of Adorno's mimesis concept is completely divested of the universalist tendency inscribing Benjamin's name concept and history of mimesis principles. This is confirmed by Negative Dialektik, where the mimetic moment is explicitly connected to a process of differentiation and distinctiveness ("Differenziertheit") grounded in experience. In this pre-enlightenment mode of observa- tion, one perceives objects in their radically discrete character through a heightened awareness of their infinitesimal qualities. They thereby become as individuated as the subject who observes them. This process of individuation creates an elective affinity between the subject and the object of his reflection. Contrary to Benjamin's elision of difference in the mimetic moment, this moment is constituted for Adorno when the uniqueness of natural objects is established by the discrimi- nating observer. The evocation of difference thus emerges as a utopian undertaking.30 While Jameson correctly sees Adorno's mimesis as "bounded" by mimicry and magic (LM 104), Adorno clearly distinguishes mimesis from these categories, although the mimetic in art does preserve the irrational impulse as a residue suppressed but not extinguished by hundreds of years of civilization. Mimetic behavior,

28. Buck-Morss 87-89. 29. Michael Cahn, "Subversive Mimesis: T.W. Adorno and the Modem Impasse

of Critique," in Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, vol. 1, ed. Mihai Spariosu (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984) 38-39, 44.

30. Adorno, Negative Dialektik 53.



the making of oneself equal to another, evolves even prior to the first known art, Paleolithic cave drawings.31 Adorno's partial structuring of mimesis as the site of an assimilatory primal scene is no doubt largely responsible for the identitarian, universal, auratic character Jameson attributes to it. Yet, as Gertrud Koch has noted, Adorno finds in the mimetic impulse a presocial resistance to the totalitarian claims of the socialization process, a resistance which Adorno saw as also engender- ing the equally primal Bilderverbot.32

The utopian dimension of Adorno's mimesis concept has been trenchantly summarized by Miriam Hansen. Instrumental rationality and the concomitant repression of objective non-identity have developed so far that mimetic resistance to these trends through assimilation, mimicry of pre-subjugated nature, and genuine nondominating reci- procity is only conceivable through utopian projection. Like Buck- Morss, Hansen associates Adorno's mimetic with his concept of reconciliation; mimesis as a utopian construct allows reconciliation with nature to be projected as a not-unrealizable telos, though only in the domain of art. Mimesis "aims at a mode of subjective experience, a pro- verbial form of cognition, which is rendered objective in works of art, summoned up by the density of their construction. Such moments of transsubjective expression constitute art's promesse de bonheur, the unful- filled promise of reconciliation."33 Although Jameson believed Adorno's adaptation of this definition of art by Stendhal was intended to suggest a false happiness, a happiness sundered from pleasure (LM 146), he feels Adorno's mimetic allows "some potential or utopian truth-content to come into its own" (LM 68). But Adorno finds that the mimetic evokes truth in art only in a negative way, by dialectically exposing, through the artwork's very structure, the irrationality of a nature-domi- nating rational world whose media it is forced to employ in the service of its own non-instrumental (and thus pre-rational and pre-subjugat- ing) creation.34 In the face of Adorno's negative dialectics, which ex- tend to the domain of art, it is difficult to sustain the argument that his mimetic is a strategy designed to bring fourth a "truth content," an expression coined by Benjamin in the context of his more straightfor- wardly redemptive aesthetics.

31. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, 4th ed. (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1980) 487-88. 32. Koch 37-39. 33. Miriam Hansen, "Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida,

Kracauer," New German Critique 56 (Sping/Summer 1992) 52-53. 34. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, 86-87.


John Pizer 147

Jameson uses this phrase in arguing that the term "narrative" may be substituted for Adorno's "mimesis" in order both to avoid the aporias associated with a mimetic view of human language and to access the dramatic richness of reason's drive toward domination as de- lineated by Adorno (LM 66-67). In Marxism and Form, Jameson asserted in connection with Lukics' Theorie des Romans that "Utopia is not an idea but a vision. It is therefore not abstract thought, but concrete narration itself that is the proving ground for all utopian activity" (MF 173). Jameson suggests that Bloch shared this view, and organizes the bitur- cated temporality informing Bloch's evocation of a utopian fulfillment into "dramatic and lyrical modes" (MF 146). Bloch's utopian principle is the one most strongly endorsed byJameson in The Political Unconscious as articulating a Marxist ideal of the future (PU 236). It may be argued thatJameson's focus on Adorno at the expense of Bloch and Lukics in Late Marxism indicates a certain skepticism about the utopian postulates expressed earlier. But although he carefully distinguishes the thought of Adorno from that of Bloch and Lukiacs in Late Marxism, his misreading of Adorno's mimetic with a narrative striving towards the revelation of a utopian truth-content brings about their entanglement. Their attempts to evoke the utopian are seen by Jameson as inscribed by narrativity, by a narrative moment in search of a hidden truth. The concept of "narrative" is traditionally associated with linearity, continuity, and successivity, and Adorno's work is marked by deliberate fragmentation and the antinomies of his negative dialectics. Jameson's belief that this term can be used to clarity Adorno's mimetic is thus highly questionable. Jameson is aware that Adorno's thought most strongly resists an assimilation to his own continuous striving to elucidate the utopian, and this is why his engagement with this dimension of Adorno's thought is at once more conflicted, lengthy and productive than his treatment of utopia in Bloch, Luk~cs and other writers. But this utopian telos also leads Jameson to somewhat misconstrue Adorno's mimetic.

Much of Late Marxism is devoted to an exploration of Adorno's aesthetic modernism. Though Jameson identifies Adorno as a proponent of modernism as a "high" cultural movement, he is careful not to accuse Adorno of the peculiarly insular and interiorized form of utopianism many (including Jameson himself) have identified as its movens. For Adorno is so rigorously attuned to "the commodity form" which lies "at the very heart of twentieth-century modernism," as Jameson noted



in his 1976 essay "Criticism in History" (Essays, 1 134), that he can only view modernism's totalizing utopian instinct as a form of second-nature resistance to this commodification, and does not allow himself to be seduced by the chimeric visions of modernism themselves. Indeed, if Adorno does embrace any manifestations of this quite heteroge- neous movement, it is the "nominalist or minimalist moment[s]" he found in the work of artists such as Schonberg and Beckett (LM 159). However, Jameson characterizes Adorno's modernism as somewhat dated, particularly when he considers how even the most powerfully oppositional works associated with this movement have been coopted in the postmodern world to further the process of absolute commodification: "For what was once an oppositional and anti-social phe- nomenon in the early years of the century, has today become the dominant style of commodity production and an indispensable component in the machinery oftthe latter's ever more rapid and demanding reproduction of itself." Hollywood uses Schanberg's theories in composing musical scores, and multinational corporations use paintings of the high modernist school to adorn their office buildings.35

This brings up the more general question of how Adorno is to be seen in the context of postmodernism, or, more precisely, it leads us to a consideration of Jameson's views on this subject, particularly as they are mediated by his conceptualization of the utopian. Albrecht Well- mer's comparison of Jameson and Adorno as they stand under the sign of the postmodern is instructive in this regard. Referring to Jameson's 1982 interview in Diacritics, Wellmer notes a parallel between his opti- mistic views on the possibility of a non-authoritarian postmodern concept of totality instantiated by "the postmodern renunciation of the vi- olence of a 'totalizing' reason," and Adorno's embrace of the "non-vi- olent unity of the manifold." He also sees Jameson's delineation of the allegorical character of postmodern art as reminiscent of Adorno's (and Benjamin's) aesthetics.36 Wellmer's indication of Jameson's proxim- ity to Adorno in the affirmation of a non-totalizing totality dimly discerned in the postmodern age reminds us that Late Marxism is one of the few works on Adorno to show how the concept of totality itself played a positive heuristic role in Adorno's sociological and aesthetic explora- tions. Jameson shows us how this concept, even as it is conflictually

35. SeeJameson, "Reflections in Conclusion," Aesthetics and Politics, Ernst Bloch, et al. (London: New Left Books, 1977) 208-09.

36. Wellmer 51.


John Pizer 149

evoked in Adorno's negative dialectics, can be used as a corrective to the postmodernist embrace of the aleatory and random (LM 244-45). Indeed, in the same breath in which Jameson repeats his assertions about the outmoded character of Adorno's modernist aesthetics, he draws on them to represent, by way of contrast, the utopian impulse in postmodernism's mass cultural artifacts.

This impulse is even more occluded in postmodern cultural products than in works of high modernism because of the superficial but "universal depoliticization" inherent in the contemporary age, and Jameson proposes a new theory of postmodern commodification, which would update Adorno/Horkheimer's "now historical one," as a similarly sobering corrective to now dominant "utopian" (here used in a negative sense, indicative of misplaced sanguinity) theories of mass culture (LM 142-43). We might thus modify Wellmer's comparison to note that Jameson may show a kinship to Adorno in his evocation of a positive postmodern concept of totality, but he more directly draws on Adorno in repre- senting the deep structural entanglement of hegemonic commodification, totality, and utopian tendencies (as well as their distortion by contemporary theoreticians) in the postmodern age.

One must also concur with Wellmer's highlighting of a contiguity between Adorno's belief in the allegorical character of all art and Jameson's characterization of postmodern aesthetics as fundamentally allegorical in nature. Nevertheless, Jameson identities Adorno's incli- nation to see legitimate works of art as discontinuous, highly individuated, and incapable of being unified under the broad rubric of artistic typologies as nominalism rather than as an embrace of allegorical aesthetics. Adorno's nominalism is not only a significant topic in Late Modernism (see especially LM 157-64), but in Jameson's book on postmodernism as well, where it is defined as "the tendential repudiation of general or universal forms (including genre itself) and the intensiftying will of the aesthetic to identity itself ever more closely with the here and now of this unique situation and this unique expression" (PM 152). In Asthetische Theorie, Adorno actually defines the tendency of individual art works to nullity aesthetic transcendence - and by this he means the pu- tative transcendence of external form as well as of the temporal "here and now" -- as the catastrophic realization of art works as allegory (though even the dissipation of aesthetic transcendence through such allegorization itself becomes aesthetic). This is the apocalyptic "explo- sion" of works of art, which allows them to wrest themselves from the empirical. Although he attributes this dynamic property to all art, he



cites modernists (Wols and Wedekind) as examples, and describes it as universal only in connection with "art today."37 It is a general axiom of Adorno's aesthetics that this element in avant-garde art is what exposes, in a liberating manner, its reified character. Jameson, on the other hand, focuses on the postmodern as the locus of such resistance.38

This brings us to Jameson's elucidation of the utopian in postmodem art. Although Late Marxism indicates that the utopian dimension in works of postmodernism is particularly well-concealed, he notes in Postmoder- nism, or, the cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that "Utopian, in First World postmodemism, has become a powerful (left) political word rather than its opposite" (PM xvi, Jameson's italics). Jameson periodically reminds us in the course of this work of the need to isolate the utopian impulse in the postmodem, particularly in view of conservative attempts to see it as detaced. According to Jameson, postmodernism is principally defined by its lack of a discrete and totalized interior authorial space, and postmodem works celebrate their deindividuated status as ancillaries to a vaguely contoured "metatext." Thus, one can see why Jameson's claim in Late Marxism that the postmodem age is characterized by universal depoliticization is entirely consistent with his assertion in Postmodernism that the utopian is overtly tied to the political in postmodern art. For the political dimension of postmodem art would inevitably be quite overt it such art foregrounds its exteriority, its relationship to the outside world, no matter what overt political content is manifested in such exteriority, and no matter how apolitical the outside world appears to be. Jameson, in fact, draws on the principle of nominalism which he associates with Adomo to elucidate what he sees as the collapse of the inner, discrete artistic space as a meaningful, coherent realm in the postmodern age.39 He

37. Adorno, Asthestische Theorie 131. 38. I am largely indebted to Ulrich Sch6nherr's article "Adorno, Ritter Gluck, and

the Tradition of the Postmodern," trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, New German Critique 48 (Fall 1989): 135-54, for this insight. Schdnherr objects to a tendency he finds in both Adorno and Jameson to privilege strategies of resistance in avant-garde works over such strategies as they are manifested in older, "traditional," efforts. Of course, Adorno's distinction is between modernist art and earlier or contemporary "epigonal" creations, while Jameson uses the same criterion in differentiating between modernity and the postmodern. See esp. 153.

39. Though Martin Donougho's distinction between them on the issue of such a differentiated site should also be taken into account: "Where Adorno hopes to main- tain a certain critical space for the aesthetic, via a modernist negation of the reified life- world, postmodernism accedes to what Jameson calls the abolition of critical distance." In Donougho, "Postmodern Jameson," Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, ed. Douglas Kellner (Washington D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1989) 85 (Donougho's emphasis).


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also uses Adorno's authority in refuting anti-utopian thought, and draws on the Adorno/Horkheimer concept of a "dialectic of enlightenment," with its refutation of all first terms, to show the conservative fallacy of seeing Marxist projections of utopia as contaminated by nostalgic visions of a prelapsarian/precapitalist paradise (PM 336-37 and 363-64).

These strategic moves in Postmodemism are consistent with a tendency we have discerned throughout the course oftJameson's entire oeuvre, a strategy uniquely his own; despite Adorno's reputation as a pessimistic, non-utopian, "melancholy" (Gillian Rose) thinker, and in spite ofJameson's obvious misgivings about this radically negational tenor of Adorno's theory, Jameson constantly has recourse to Adorno - sometimes conflictually, sometimes as a supporting witness - in developing his own conception of utopia, and in tracing utopian manifestations throughout the history of Western culture. And in Postmodernism as elsewhere, Jameson turns Adorno's negative dialectic on its head in order to demonstrate the overall historical viability of "totality" as a discursive category, a category Jameson once again brings into contiguity with the idea of the utopian (PM 401-02). Adorno may be the skeleton in Jameson's closet, but he also plays the role of Mephistopheles to Jameson's Faust, the spirit who, in constantly denying, negating and nullifying, forces Jameson to focus his dialectical energies as he attempts to glimpse utopia as the totalizing and totalized projection of collective human desire.

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Article Contentsp. 127p. 128p. 129p. 130p. 131p. 132p. 133p. 134p. 135p. 136p. 137p. 138p. 139p. 140p. 141p. 142p. 143p. 144p. 145p. 146p. 147p. 148p. 149p. 150p. 151

Issue Table of ContentsNew German Critique, No. 58 (Winter, 1993), pp. 1-191Front Matter [pp. 1-24]Have the Intellectuals Failed? On the Sociopolitical Claims and the Influence of Literary Intellectuals in West Germany [pp. 3-23]Homeric Laughter by the Waters of Babylon [pp. 25-44]From Schoenberg to Odysseus: Aesthetic, Psychic, and Social Synthesis in Adorno and Wellmer [pp. 45-64]Abortion as Repression in Christoph Hein's The Distant Lover [pp. 65-78]Making off with an Exile - Heidegger and the Jews [pp. 79-85]The Timeliness of Martin Heidegger's National Socialism [pp. 86-96]Antisemitism in Postwar Germany [pp. 97-108]Afro-German Cultural Identity and the Politics of Positionality: Contests and Contexts in the Formation of a German Ethnic Identity [pp. 109-126]Jameson's Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Utopian [pp. 127-151]Dissatisfied Society [pp. 153-178]Intellectual Deliverance [pp. 179-191]Back Matter [pp. 152-152]

jameson adorno

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