Abstract
Abstract This article locates Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology (2019) in the context of the broader trajectory of his career-long critique of the bourgeois centred subject. It argues that, for Jameson, the project of critique requires systematic depersonalisation at the level of thought. Contrary to negative liberal humanist interpretations of depersonalisation, Jameson stresses its hidden, revolutionary potential. Where his earlier work eschewed metanarratives of modernity premised upon shifts in subjectivity, preferring conjunctural or situational analyses, his more recent work – Antinomies of Realism (2013) and Allegory and Ideology in particular – develops a materialist version of just such metanarratives. The article concludes with a detailed application of Jameson’s allegorical method to the figure of the ‘person’ under capitalism, which can be sub-divided into the four levels of: individual, citizen/juridical person, infrastructural personifications, and the realm of social reproduction.
Highlights
It would be tempting, to go on to show how even the forms of modern literary criticism are unable to evade the dynamic of depersonalisation
Contrary to negative liberal humanist interpretations of depersonalisation, Jameson stresses its hidden, revolutionary potential. Where his earlier work eschewed metanarratives of modernity premised upon shifts in subjectivity, preferring conjunctural or situational analyses, his more recent work – Antinomies of Realism (2013) and Allegory and Ideology in particular – develops a materialist version of just such metanarratives
The article concludes with a detailed application of Jameson’s allegorical method to the figure of the ‘person’ under capitalism, which can be sub-divided into the four levels of: individual, citizen/juridical person, infrastructural personifications, and the realm of social reproduction
Summary
The ‘person’, viewed negatively, is the experiential corollary of reification: the lived modality of the monad amidst the alien tundra of capital’s second nature. Precisely because of the imperial context comprising vast class and cultural diversity, the formulation of this internal space becomes an allegorical figuration of the external spaces of empire: ‘a systemic review of social positions linking characterology with external class and geographical (ethnic) positions’.14 Jameson reads this shift from the limited dynamics of the Greek polis to the scale of the Roman empire as analogous to our ‘contemporary supersession of the national by globalization.’. Even in the now-canonical chapter on Balzac in The Political Unconscious we discover ‘a psychic situation in which the centred subject has not yet emerged’. Jameson 1981, p. 179. Jameson 2019, p. 243. Gramsci 1971, p. 324
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