Political Unconscious Research Articles

«Автобиография профессора Николая Иосифовича Воробьева»

The publication is a commentary and the text of the handwritten autobiography of N.I. Vorobyev. The document is introduced into scholarly discourse for the first time. The undertaken analysis of the text allowed us to identify new facts from the life and work of the researcher and to grasp their context. The document is dated March 2, 1947 and was written by the scholar during his work at Kazan State University. N.I. Vorobyev lists in detail the facts about his parents, the process of receiving an education, the beginning of his teaching and research work. He reveals the evolution of his own academic interests, from geography to ethnography, and highlights the author’s scholarly papers that are of significance from his point of view. The document mentions N.I. Vorobyev’s research work in the Far East dedicated to the study of the life of the Nanai (the Golds) and in the Mari ASSR – limnological studies of lakes. The researcher emphasises his work on methodological support of teachers. A separate chapter of the autobiography contains a description of the academic’s participation in the work of various public scholarly organisations. N.I. Vorobyev focuses on the important aspects of his life that correspond to the spirit of those times. This is the recognition of his political unconsciousness in the first years of the Soviet power, service in the Red Army as a private soldier. The autobiography of N.I. Vorobyev is a valuable, informative source. It shows not only the significance of individual milestones in his life and work for the scholar himself, but also reveals the distinctive features of the Soviet era, which formed the conditions for work for the entire academic community.

Narrative as a Symbolic Social Act: Sexual Bribery and the Pragmatics of Resolution in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Kunle Afolayan’s Citation

This paper explores pragmatic approaches to dealing with issues of sexual harassment within the academy. This is achieved through an analysis of the plot resolutions in two narratives, drawing on Frederic Jameson’s framework of the Political Unconscious. Within this context, the paper examines J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Kunle Afolayan’s Citation asw symbolic acts that explore symbolic resolutions of social contradictions. The selected texts enable a reflection on the BBC’s October 6, 2019 documentary on sex for grades, and nurture a symbolic dimension to appreciating the complexities and power relations in sexual harassment reporting in the academy. The paper demonstrates that the two narratives engage in a broader dialogue with theoretical concepts to speak to the dynamics of mediated sexual scandals.

READING WORKS, INTERPRETING WORLDS: A POSTMODERN-LITERARY EXPLORATION IN FREDERIC JAMESON'S HORIZON

This conceptual article aims to explore literary works through the perspective of Fredric Jameson. Literary works have legitimacy as a critical space for real problems, however, many of them also expose the author’s ideological side or reality. This is the political unconsciousness. This research approach is grounded theory because this exploration moves from the empirical realm to the theory-based realm in analyzing data. The data are in the form of quotation statements taken from relevant reference books, articles or journals. The data collection technique is documentation because this research is a type of library research. The analysis technique is thematic analysis. From the exploration results, it can be seen that Jameson sees a text as a symbolic act, resistant but reproducible to the dominant ideology. This is the condition of reification, in which the subject (writer and/character) is drowning to a process of totalization towards unconsciousness which is inherent in ideological power. This is the political unconscious which leads us to the unmasking of cultural artifacts (literary texts) as interpreted social symbolic actions

제국주의 없는 제국과 제국 없는 제국주의 사이 : 차태근 지음, 『제국주의 담론과 동아시아 근대성: 현대 중국의 정치적 무의식을 찾아서』(소명출판, 2021)를 읽고

제국주의 없는 제국과 제국 없는 제국주의 사이 : 차태근 지음, 『제국주의 담론과 동아시아 근대성: 현대 중국의 정치적 무의식을 찾아서』(소명출판, 2021)를 읽고

The Making of Abstraction. Some Hypotheses on Money, Language, and Modern Literature

The question I have tried to answer is whether there is such a thing as linguistic alienation and what its consequences are for Marxist literary studies and for understanding the so-called "superstructure" in general. Relevant assumptions on this subject were elaborated, above all, in the sixties and seventies by Lefebvre, Rossi-Landi, Baudrillard and Latouche, through the tabulation of a parallelism between Marx's theory of value and Saussure's theory of sign. In my opinion, all these hypotheses failed to understand the specificity of the Marxist interpretation of money, which is a very different form of semiotics, because (as Finelli and Arthur, among others, have shown) it owes much to Hegelian logic. Therefore, I try to demonstrate that, putting certain categories of semiotics and philosophy of language to interpret the critique of Marx's political economy, money is not a sign but a code: paraphrasing Lacan, it could be said that capital is configured like a language. It is not, however, a neutral language, but a linguistic praxis capable of hiding a material situation through abstractions. If this is correct, we do not need to ask how a matter (the structure) acts on a series of semantic and ideological chains (the superstructure), but to what extent capital itself, considered as a text, functions as a formal model (using Marx's words: a formelle bestimmung) for the organization of all matter in which its domain of abstraction extends. The "structural causality" on which Jameson relies in The Political Unconscious is thus the result of the dialectical link between mechanical and expressive causalities.

The Political Impact of Chewing Khat (Chat) on Chewers: In the Case of Woldia City Administration of North Wollo, Amhara National Regional State

The main aim of this study was to investigate the political impact of chewing khat on the chewers in Woldia City Administration of North Wollo, Amhara National Regional State. As far as the researcher's reading, no research was conducted in Ethiopia dealing with the political impact of chewing khat on chewers. Accordingly, this study was conducted using qualitative methods of data collection. Semi-structured in-depth interview, focus group discussion (FGD), and complete observation were employed during data collection. The study used phenomenology design and the findings were analyzed thematically. The study found that khat chewers’ political unconsciousness, utopian involvement in politics, and fail in conspired politics were associated with khat chewing practices. Based on this findings, the researchers recommend that awarness creation about the anxiety of khat in political life is in need.

Difference Relates: Allegory, Ideology, and the Anthropocene

Abstract Fredric Jameson’s recent book, Allegory and Ideology, argues that allegory has become a ‘social symptom’, an attempt during moments of historical crisis to represent reality even as that reality, rife with contradictory levels, eludes representation. Mobilising the fourfold medieval system of allegory he first introduced in The Political Unconscious, Jameson traces a formal history of attempts to come to terms with the ‘multiplicities’ and incommensurable levels that emerge within modernity and postmodernity. This article identifies the complexities of Jameson’s understanding of allegory and draws on the brief moments when Jameson references the Anthropocene to argue for an allegorical reading of our contemporary environmental crisis that would allow us to see the problem the Anthropocene names as truly contradictory: at one and the same time, the world we inhabit appears to us as a world of our own making and as a world that has become truly alien to us.

Difference Relates: Allegory, Ideology, and the Anthropocene

Abstract Fredric Jameson’s recent book, Allegory and Ideology, argues that allegory has become a ‘social symptom’, an attempt during moments of historical crisis to represent reality even as that reality, rife with contradictory levels, eludes representation. Mobilising the fourfold medieval system of allegory he first introduced in The Political Unconscious, Jameson traces a formal history of attempts to come to terms with the ‘multiplicities’ and incommensurable levels that emerge within modernity and postmodernity. This article identifies the complexities of Jameson’s understanding of allegory and draws on the brief moments when Jameson references the Anthropocene to argue for an allegorical reading of our contemporary environmental crisis that would allow us to see the problem the Anthropocene names as truly contradictory: at one and the same time, the world we inhabit appears to us as a world of our own making and as a world that has become truly alien to us.

To Reassemble Capitalism: Economic Sociology and its “Political Unconscious.” On “Political Economy after Neoliberalism” by Neil Fligstein and Steven Vogel

The article offers a commentary on the discussion of the article “Political Economy after Neoliberalism” by Fligstein and Vogel, published in the current issue of the Journal of Economic Sociology. The authors draw the attention of Russian-speaking readers to the fact that the work of American researchers not only problematizes the content of political debates in the United States, but also shapes the basic principles of economic and sociological analysis of various economic systems in their connection with regulation policies and public control. Arguments are given in favor of the fact that the article by Fligstein and Vogel is a kind of manifesto of new economic sociology, demonstrating its “political unconscious”-a number of axiomatic assumptions about the functioning of the capitalist political economy, arising from the research perspective of economic sociology and related disciplines. The structure of the argument proposed in the article includes an analysis of several theoretical and empirical directions: a discussion about the varieties of empirical models of capitalism and statements about the political nature of choice of the institutional architecture of economies, the ways of organizing relations between corporations and society, and the role of the state in the economy. The authors note that the so-called neoliberal turn in social and economic policy in recent years was partly based on the purely intellectual principle in mainstream economic theory that opposes states and markets. Studies in the field of economic sociology, history, and comparative political economy demonstrate the fallacy of this statement, offering a conceptual resource for rethinking modern capitalism.

Blaming the Poor: The False Allure of the Capitalist Critique in the Age of Postmodernism

This article considers The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012) in order to argue through Fredric Jameson that postmodern aspects of a text are capable of obfuscating, if not altogether obliterating, any Marxist polemics. The first portion engages with Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, particularly his emphasis on class struggle and identification of ideologemes which manifest in the text. The subsequent section considers The Dark Knight Rises as a postmodern text through Jameson’s concepts of pastiche and nostalgia. Moreover, The Dark Knight Rises is contextualizedwithin the recent spate of class-oriented cinema. Collectively, the goal is to identify a trend within such films of establishing a correlation between capitalism and inequality, ideologemes and postmodernism. The final result is an increasingly impressive group of genre-spanning films which address contemporary inequality in its multifarious forms, but which treat these issues more so as narrative devices than tenable critiques of the sites of oppression.

Blurring Boundaries and a Generic Matrix in Jane Eyre’s ‘Political Unconscious’

In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson regards genres as ‘literary institutions’, arguing that genres are political and a reflection of the socio-historical circumstances. Earlier in Marxism and Form, Jameson had proposed that the key aspect of a text is its form and that content is only secondary to form. In this sense, interpretation is inseparable from literary form — and all interpretation is historical. This paper attempts to map Jane Eyre’s ‘political unconscious’ to suggest that the novel’s generic elasticity — its elaborate fusion of Gothic transgression, romance dialectics and echoes of autobiography and Bildungsroman — is the hidden and coded manifestation of a utopian imagination. In effect, Jane Eyre incorporates a technique of montage and a (subsequent) collapse of generic boundaries, because the text’s political unconscious dreams of a disintegration of class boundaries. It is often argued that the concept of genre is no longer relevant in our postmodern context, as postmodern texts are characterized by a tendency to transgress generic boundaries. This paper considers the theoretical implications of such transgression for an interpretation of Jane Eyre’s generic affiliations.

The Form of Political Offenders that Appeared in Novels in the Time of Enlightenment and Political Unconsciousness

The Form of Political Offenders that Appeared in Novels in the Time of Enlightenment and Political Unconsciousness

Paratextual Art

Paratextual Art David J. Alworth Consider the paratext of Gerard Genette's Paratexts. Or more precisely: glance at the cover image and try to imagine how the book might feel in your hands.1 Originally published in French in 1987, Paratexts was translated into English and republished ten years later by Cambridge University Press as number 20 in the series "Literature, Culture, Theory."2 It looks like it belongs there. The abstract linearity of the image suggests scientific reason, rational argumentation, and taxonomic precision. Without even cracking it open, you can sense that this book participates in what the series editors designate "the systematic study of literature." (P, front endpapers) At the same time, though, other paratextual effects pull in a different direction. The smooth, glossy finish of the binding calls to mind the supermarket paperback, the glitzy magazine, or the movie poster, while the tropical color palette (purple, magenta, aquamarine) conjures up the atmosphere of beach reading in the era of Miami Vice. It is easy to find other paratexts that resemble this one: visual objects that not only index the state of the discipline but also employ the color palates of American mass culture at the time of publication. In fact, a whole genre of critical writing has been visualized this way. Take, for instance, Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics, published in 1975, whose orange vortex suggests the widening gyre of lyrical complexity; or Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, published in 1981, whose palimpsest of squares, evoking flyleaves or parchment paper, anticipates the semiotic cubes contained within its pages, and whose modest flash of color—lavender—offers just a touch of softness to a book that figures interpretation as a kind of blood-sport, "tak[ing] place," as Jameson writes in the preface, "within a Homeric battlefield."3 Indeed, the visual culture of the codex in the era of High Theory—when literary studies was striving explicitly and self-consciously to adopt what Michel Foucault called "the norms of scientificity"—is characterized by geometrical shapes, sans serif fonts, and various motifs of layering and repetition that connote both the bottomless mystery of the literary text and the strenuous work of depth hermeneutics.4 [End Page 1123] While the recent swerve in the literary humanities away from theory and toward method has called such notions into question, there remains much to be learned from Genette's Paratexts: a classic work of French literary theory that, in hindsight, appears to exemplify at least one version of "surface reading," insofar as it dwells on the visible, tangible apparatus through which literature makes and meets its publics.5 Of course, Genette was writing in the mid-1980s, a moment that feels like eons ago in the history of technical media, so his terms will need some updating to account for the rise of digital culture and other more recent phenomena—which is what I aim to do in this essay by placing Genette's theoretical account in dialogue with the everyday practice of book design in the twenty-first century. However hypertechnical it can seem, Paratexts is worth rereading for at least two reasons: first, because it provides an analytically precise vocabulary for conceptualizing the abstract zone, or what Genette would call the "threshold," where text meets context; and second, because it constitutes a preliminary effort to analyze the status and function of the book cover, or more specifically the book jacket, which is one of the most significant and significantly underappreciated media platforms in the history of culture (P, 2).6 Far from being mere ornamentation, book jackets are crucial to literary art in the digital age. As part of a media ecology that includes promotional materials, digital marketing campaigns, and in some cases television or film adaptations, book jackets make novels visible in a world where there is simply too much to see.7 They form a hinge not only between reality and fiction but also between literature and design, aesthetics and politics, art and life. To analyze a jacket or a cover, then, is to analyze a lively interplay among the people, institutions, business practices, economies, cultural conventions, desires, and values that make literature possible. And such analysis...

The Political Unconscious Staged in J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World

The Political Unconscious Staged in J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World

Political Activity of Revolution Leaders and Masses in Russian Province

The article is dedicated to a complicated question concerned the role of party leaders in revolution propaganda in Russian provinces in 1917. The author observes different kinds of political mind during the revolution and activity of different groups of people in revolution events. The main role in arranging and strengthening the local revolutionary organizations played the party leaders of the central party organizations who visited provinces for a special purpose or transiently during the transit under the police supervision. But sometimes it was hard for them to rule the masses because of their political unconsciousness.

‘민주사회주의’의 유령과 중립통일론의 정치학 : 1960년대 김수영·신동엽 시의 정치적 무의식에 대하여

‘민주사회주의’의 유령과 중립통일론의 정치학 : 1960년대 김수영·신동엽 시의 정치적 무의식에 대하여

The War Novel in Africa

The War Novel in Africa

Modernism under Review: Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981)

Fredric Jameson's seminal text The Political Unconscious is one of the great works of post-war critical theory. It launched a materialist cultural studies in American university humanities departments and beyond. Its mandarin Marxism adapted the ‘Late Marxism’ of Lukács, Bloch, Adorno and others for the academy and for the post-modern era, focussing on Marxism's singular capacity to offer a total reading of an artwork. It also implicitly faces Marxism off against a wave of French theory that was new when the book was written, especially those theories of power being developed by Foucault and Deleuze. This essay makes the case that Jameson's book gives us a Deleuzian Marxism avant la lettre, and that the book should be reread with care now, when eco-critique has embraced a Deleuzianism that needs the heft of a class politics.

Study on the Fear of Machine/Technological Objects and the Political Unconscious of Fantasy - focussing on TV Drama, <Huge Tower of Fantasy> -

Study on the Fear of Machine/Technological Objects and the Political Unconscious of Fantasy - focussing on TV Drama, <Huge Tower of Fantasy> -

Literature in the Midst of Continual Warfare

LITERATURE IN THE MIDST OF CONTINUAL WARFAREBelletto, Steven, and Daniel Grausam, eds. 2012. Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. $49.95 sc. $49.95 e-Book. 240 pp.Banita, Georgiana. 2012. Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. $60.00 hc. 357 pp.In late May 2013, President Obama gave a speech at the National Defense University defending his administration's use of unmanned drones as a counterterrorism measure. Although he acknowledged the controversy surrounding the practice and agreed to expand oversight, the president insisted upon the efficacy and necessity of the strikes. His language asserted a superior moral standing-America does not take strikes to punish individuals, he explained; we act against terrorists who posea continuing and imminent threat to the people-while gesturing toward a constitutional legal framework that respects the inherent dignity of every human (2013). Underscoring these appeals was language that positions both the danger and the government's response as exceptional and, therefore, necessarily short-lived. Yet the certainty on display was undermined by Obama's curious decision to quote his nineteenth- century predecessor James Madison: No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual (Political Observations, April 20, 1798, quoted in Obama 2013). Rather than assuring Americans, the reference in fact reminds the audience of the country's tenuous first decades and, more pressingly, of our contemporary history of US-led police actions, of retaliatory attacks, of hot wars conducted by proxy forces, and so on. Instead of bolstering the president's claims, then, the quotation reveals his rhetoric to be only on a surface level, uneasily obscuring the intricacies of actual history and the human cost of these actions. As this dissonance vividly illustrates, such facile explanations are insufficient for making sense of life in the midst of continual warfare.Readers have long turned to literature to investigate these complexities, as famously argued in essays by Mikhail Bakhtin and in Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious. In fact, critics of postwar literature have been keenly interested in the tensions between the moral and legal narratives advanced by political figures like President Obama and the consequences, both practical and philosophical, of their decisions. To this end, several compelling literary and cultural analyses have been released over the last twenty years, with Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture, originally published in 1995, and Alan Nadel's Containment Culture (1995) among the most important. According to Nadel and Engelhardt, Cold War power operated according to a logic of containment that sought to narrowly define a true American ethos while eradicating or limiting the influence of foreign and domestic forces that did not conform. These actions were bolstered by what Engelhardt calls triumphalist narratives (2007, 9), stories that refigured the Manifest Destiny belief in exceptionalism for the post-World War II political landscape in which the United States was a major superpower. Where these studies were largely interested in explicitly Cold War texts and events, recent studies including Samuel Cohen's After the End of History (2009) and Sally Bachner's The Prestige of Violence (2011) have attempted to extend this method beyond 1989. Obama called the period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks a decade of peace and prosperity (2013), but Cohen and Bachner demonstrate that the difficulties inherent in continual warfare remain prevalent even in the absence of official war. And yet, as conflicts continue and change, the familiar interpretive constructs grow outdated, becoming just as inadequate as political speeches to understanding literature written in response to nontraditional combat. …