أ.م. خالد قيس عبد
Ideology and Text Manifestation in Fredric Jameson's Thought
الأيديولوجيا و تجلّي النص في فِكر فريدريك جيمسن
أ.م. خالد قيس عبد
Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious is one of the intrinsic terms in Marxism. The term means that a literary text is related to ideological and political unconscious. The political relationship reflects the class conflict in the society. According to Jameson, employing the Marxist, semiotic and psychoanalytic analysis is required to decipher the political unconscious. Furthermore, Edward Said states about Jameson's book as representing "a remarkably complex and deeply attractive argument … [which] reaches its climax in Jameson's conclusion, in which the utopian element in all cultural production is shown to play an underanalyzed and liberating role in human society (Said 119). The political endeavor to make any change in the society is a matter of adhering to the sense of tradition rather than to the present reality. He suggests that "a particular text must take place within three concentric frameworks …, first of political history, in the narrower sense of punctual event and a chroniclelike sequence of happenings in time; then of society … and ultimately, of history now conceived in its vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production … " (Jameson 1291). Jameson's three areas of analysis are categorized into three: the political that is the record of successive events in a fictive context as constructed in the plot. The social refers to the conflict or emergence into awareness of the conflict of ideologemes, the thinking about the world as expressed by the conflicting classes of the society. The historical is, according to Jameson is a necessity which has a pivotal role in the literary analysis of the text and with the understanding of the overlap of the modes of production as they unfold in historical time. These three concentric frameworks are merged one with the other and have to be reconsidered when analyzing a text from a Marxist perspective. In the second stage when one of these perspectives is enforced and enabled by this horizon, here the individual exegesis is grasped as a symbolic act (Jameson 1291-2). Thus, reading the text in an ideological way fills the gap between the signifier and the signified and this is what Jameson proposes as reading a text as a socially symbolic act. In this point, Jameson dismantles Freud's model of reality principle, "that part of psyche that recognizes the need for societal standards and regulations on pleasure" (Bressler 145), to which the oppressive realistic representation is the bail in terms of Jameson's anesthetization.
Although the text is a mixture of religious, social and psychological implications, its final analysis is, according to Jameson, political. The unconscious is not tied to meaning, but to how the text works. It attempts to symbolically resolve tensions and conflicts within the text and get them encompassed within it. His belief of the text having an unconscious is based on the idea of the unconscious is repressed in reality and can be unconcealed only by the reader's consciousness which is itself imbued by the world and its materialistic condition or by wielding certain rules of appreciation.
Works Cited
Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and
Practice. New Jersey: Pearson, 2007.
Dini, Rachele. An Analysis of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Routledge, 2017.
Jameson, Fredirc. "from the Political Unconscious." The Critical
tradition: classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 3rd ed. Edited by
David H. Richter, Bedford/ St. Martin's, 2007, p.p 1291-1306.
Said, Edward W. "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and
Community." Critical Inquiry, vol. 9, no.1, The Politics of
Interpretation, Sep., 1982, pp. 1-26.
Keywords: ideology1, Marxism2, Fredric Jameson3.