File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1996/96-12-15.193, message 81


Date: Mon, 9 Dec 1996 00:14:08 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: M-TH: FREDERIC JAMESON - MYTH OR REALITY?


Is Frederick Jameson for real?  I met him once, when I was young and
innocent.  Though I can't pinpoint exactly why, at the time he struck me
as a boneheaded bullshit artist.  I just read the first and last
chapters of THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS.  I've never seen so much
highfalutin piffle packed into each page.  It's like reading an exercise
in intellectual name-dropping, where the goal is: how many theoretical
works can you mention before the buzzer sounds?  Don't get me wrong. 
I'm not anti-intellectual.  I'm not Louis Proyect.  I am sophisticated
enough to be able to recognize intellectual content, no matter how
abstruse.  But Jameson appears to me to be a philosophical faker of the
first water.  He comes off as a person who lives in an abstract fog,
without any contact with anything substantial.  Sure, he has the ability
to process abstract ideas through his cerebral sausage machine, like the
expressive totality.  But he comes off to me as naive, intellectually
gullible, and fundamentally .... uncritical!  I don't know what he
stands for, but from the Althusserianism of the first chapter, I'll bet
he's Stalinist to the core, even/especially while praising Althusser as
an anti-Stalinist! 
 
Has Jameson written anything worth reading?  Or is it all as bad as
this? 


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