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Review of Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time. Originally published in Modern Philology, Feb 1997 v.94,  no.3, pp. 422ff.

In The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson's large imagination and insistent dissatisfaction with things as they are move us toward new insights into the nature of our postmodern malaise and new zones of cultural critique. In the first chapter, "The Antinomies of Postmodernity," Jameson pursues the project of "cognitive mapping" proposed at the end of his Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991). Arguing that "the age is clearly more propitious for the antinomy than the contradiction" (p. 2), Jameson outlines four symptomatic oppositions within which postmodern thought oscillates without resolution: between "absolute change" and "stasis" (p. 19); between a "global commodification" resulting in "spatial homogeneity" (p. 27) and a market-driven "individual hyperconsumption" resulting in "a well-night Bakhtinan carnival of heterogeneities" (p. 29); between a "profoundly formalist" (p. 43) philosophical antifoundationalism and a "passionately ecological revival of a sense of Nature" (p. 46) combined with a "recrudescence" of "older ideologies of human nature" (p. 4); and, finally, between an anti-utopian "celebration of late capitalism" and the "Utopian discourse" that it presses into service (p. 60).

In the second chapter, Jameson discusses Andrei Platonov's Chevengur, a Communist utopian novel of the late 1920s published in Russian only in the late 1980s. Analyzing the novel's engagement with violence, death, and change, Jameson argues that the text's deployment of irony for utopian purposes reveals a definitively "Second World" consciousness, one that repudiates the "radical devaluation of personal experience" (p. 118) passing for irony in the First World and that reflects the relatively noncommodified culture of a "non-consumer-consumptive society" (p. 74). In the final chapter, Jameson delves into the architectural criticism begun in his famous commentary on the Bonaventure Hotel in Postmodernism. Viewing self-critically his own earlier celebration of "illimitable pluralism" (p. XIV), Jameson here stresses the political and epistomological limits within which the seemingly infinite variety of postmodernist architecture is in fact contained. Even Critical Regionalism, the tendency of which Jameson most approves, is dogged by "the EPCOT syndrome raised to a global scale," leaving him to wonder, in his closing query, "Is global Difference the same today as global Indentity?" (p. 205).

The Seeds of Time advances a welcome line of Marxist critique at a time when an idealist post-Marxism and a depoliticized New Historicism -- not to mention various modes of revived conservative criticism -- shape much contemporary cultural commentary. Jameson proclaims the superiority of dialectic (presumably a discredited term) over antinomy and invokes Georg Lukacs's "dialectical nonformalism" as against the anti-foundationalism of Jurgen Habermas and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. He sharply criticizes various reactionary ideas enjoying wide-spread currency -- the notion that "human nature" is innate and depraved, for instance, or that societies based upon planning rather than markets are necessarily monolithic and repressive -- and reveals their roots in the ideological imperatives of contemporary capitalism. He insists that totality has nothing to do with totalitrianism, and that totalization is the only path to both epistemological and political coherence. Moreover, he repudiates the proposition that all there is to be remembered of "actually existing socialism" is empty store shelves, arguing that some works of "Second World" art bring us closer to utopia than practically anything produced in the West without sacrificing any of the complex irony held to be the principal modernist legacy.

It is precisely because Jameson works within the Marxist paradigm, however, that he should be held to a Marxist standard. In the context, there are three zones of arguments in The Seeds of Time that I find problematic. To begin with, the class struggle -- a term of fashion, but hardly beyond relevance -- simply does not figure in Jameson's analysis. One consequence of this absence is that his discussion of historical causality, for all its presumed awareness of dialectics, smacks of what the old-style Marxists used to call "mechanistic materialism." When Jameson examines the encroachment of global capitalism on both land usage and cultural tradition in previously peasant economies, for example, this homogenizing and dehistorizing process appears to be simply the consequence of objectively shifting modes of production, rather than a development in which both winners and losers often fought with considerable ferocity and political awareness.

A second and related consequence -- and one of greater significance for his project -- is that Jameson is unable to offer, indeed to imagine, a praxis that would enable us to break free of the epistemological and political stranglehold of the late-capitalism antinomies that he so incisively describes. While he champions Lukacs for his "dialectical nonformalism," Jameson omits any mention of the historical agency at the core of Lukacs's epistemology -- namely, his political designation of the revolutionary proletariat as the "identical subject-object of history." The Seeds of Time posits a "blockage" within the antinomies of postmodernism, envisioning our situation as one of "waiting with a kind of breathlessness, as we listen for the missing tick of the clock, the absent first step of renewed praxis: (pp. 70-71). Jameson is of course under no obligation to view the contemporary proletariat as the agent of this renewed praxis. But as a Marxist he should at least confront the terms and conditions of its potential historical role. Lacking any analytical engagement with the actual situation within late capitalism of the working class and its allies, Jameson's stance, alternately one of pathos, tragedy, and stoicism, historicizes but essentially retains the Derridean aporia. This historicization becomes a relatively empty gesture, however, if history is deprived of agency. Indeed, even the decision to be a Marxist at all in one's approach to postmodernity would seem to be grounded in will, or faith, rather than in a perception of necessity.

Another feature of Jameson's text that is somewhat troubling from a Marxist point of view is its lack of any formulated relation between utopia and communism. Jameson quite rightly argues that utopia entails more than providing the "blueprint for a communal life" (p. 123); his discussion of the stark confrontation with death in Chevengur rests on the provocative statement that it is by "removing the artificial miseries of money and self-preservation" that utopia, if anything, "exacerbates . . . the tensions and unresolvable contradictions inherent both in interpersonal relations and in bodily existence itself" (p. 110). But if it is classlessness -- that is, communism -- that enables this existential confrontation, why not say so? Jameson has of course previously raised hackles when he posited, in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), that all class consciousness -- even fascist class consciousness -- has a utopian component. But even if Jameson wishes to define utopia in such a way that it is not equated exclusively with a collective, classless form of society, the view of Utopia as actually achievable communism is clearly central to the Marxist tradition and, in particular, to the project of socialist construction represented in Chevengur.

Jameson's remarks on Chevengur are, however, frustrating abstract, even ahistorical. Platonov's novel, we are told, was written in the late 1920s, before collectivization, and treats a period between 1917 and sometime "after the implementation of the New Economic Policy in 1923: (p. 82). Jamesons does not tell us, however, how or whether the novel's dystopic finale -- the village is "destroyed by counterrevolutionary bandits" (p. 82) -- is in fact linked with the New Economic Policy. Nor does he indicate how the very short period of time containing the Bolshevik revolution, wartime communism, the civil war, and the beginnings of NEP would have been sufficient to engender -- in either its characters or its author -- a consciousness free form the influence of commodity fetishism. (Indeed, if tracing this consciousness is Jameson's primary concern, it is curious that he did not choose a Soviet novel from the 1940s or 1950s, one which, while carrying the baggage of several decades of flawed socialist construction, would also presumably articulate ways of thinking and seeing free from many more aspects of market-based social relations than would a novel from the late 1920s.) My point is not that Jameson should have written a disquisition on Soviet history. But his admirable decision to address the representation of utopia in a Second World imagination is vitiated by his reluctance to anchor that representation in concrete historical circumstances: utopia's relation to irony and death seems more compelling to him than its relation to social organization. Not only is utopia what cannot be acted upon in our present; even past attempts to anchor utopia in communism remain shrouded in mystery.

Jameson's reticence regarding the relation of utopia to communism clearly relates to his reluctance to discuss historical agency. What both omissions reflect -- and here is my third complaint -- is not just the political crisis of late twentieth-century academic Marxism but also a fundamental problem in Jameson's epistemology. Despite his elevation of antinomy over contradiction, Jameson never discusses the crucial dialectical principle of the negation of negation -- that is, the process by which one pole in an opposition engages dialectically with its opposite and, through a process of struggle, supersedes it. The postmodern condition would seem to require that we oscillate perpetually between bad and partial categories; the totality of which we strive to get a glimpse is an "unrepresentable exterior" (p. XIII). Thus Critical Regionalism, aspiring to articulate "the national-regional culture as a collective possibility in its moment of besiegement and crisis," is beset not only by "the danger of idealism in all cultural nationalism" but also by the tendency of "global American Disneyland-related corporations" to profit from pseudolocal "authenticity" (pp. 202-4). Lodged immovably in the very structure of postmodern life, Jameson's antinomies cease to appear as ideological symptoms of deeper historical contradictions and become, he complains, all that we know. But because the totality that would expose these antinomies' ideological status is also by definition unknowable, even unimaginable, we are unable to jettison the fetishized oppositions between which we bounce back and forth. Idealist epistemology is inseparable from political impotence.

To offer these criticisms of The Seeds of Time is not, however, to deny the power of Jameson's latest commentary on our postmodern condition. Indeed, it is precisely because Jameson has articulated his frustration with "waiting" and "blockage" so eloquently and has outlined our dilemma so lucidly that one is prompted to probe more deeply for ways to get beyond it.(1)