图绘世界——弗雷德里克·詹姆逊访谈录

弗雷德里克·詹姆逊 何卫华 朱国华

(美国杜克大学;浙江理工大学,杭州,310018;华东师范大学,上海,200062)

He & Zhu: Congratulations on your winning the Holberg Prize! Probably this can serve as a good place to start our interview. The Prize Academic Committee states that your most outstanding contribution lies in your “poetics of social form” which has promoted our understanding of the relations between social formations and cultural forms. This commentary profiles you as an outstanding scholar engaged in the “cognitive mapping” of contemporary society and culture, some scholars tend to think that it overshadows other more important aspects in your theoretical framework, for example the utopian impulses behind your whole intellectual project. What do you think of this comment? Can you describe briefly your self-understanding or construction of the basic or intrinsic logic that supports your academic writings, if this question does not sound too rash?

Fredric Jameson: It is always awkward for me to try to summarize my work because that always limits you in one way or another. But if I try to do that, I would say that the title “Marxism and Form” might be the best overall description of it. Particularly, if for Marxism, you substitute history. That is, it is the relationship between form and history that has always interested me. The variations in my work from forty-five years ago to the present are not necessarily changes in me and in my way of looking at things, but changes in either forms or in historical situations. So I wrote more about literature in the old days because literature was one of the central modes of aesthetic expression. I look more at mass culture and culture styles today because I think the nature of culture has changed. But my preoccupation is still on the one hand with forms: meanings of forms, the ideologies of forms and what forms transmit rather than content. Content is always important, but forms have been my interest and demanded the investigation of interpretative techniques and so forth. On the other hand, I am also obviously concerned with the nature of history and historical situation, and that includes the social and the economic and so forth. If you like, the connection of form and history has another name, and that would be “Theory”. Therefore I would characterize my work from beginning to the end as a faithfulness to Theory. But of course Theory itself has changed a lot. I will just remind you of the initial circumstances in which I started to write. That was a period in which we had very little Theory here. I define “Theory”, a little brutally perhaps, as an attack on empiricism. By this you want to show that the things we think are empirical facts are really carrying with them a whole investment of thought, ideologies or forms and all of that. Especially in the Anglo-Saxon milieu like this which is heavily empiricist, our major enemy was empiricism and its political relationship to liberalism and the Anglo-American tradition.

What happened then in those first years of the 60s and 70s: we had very little Theory, it was coming from Europe, and so really from France and was mediated a little by England. So the task of that first moment was really the transmission of many of these European theoretical approaches, both French and German. I think you know this in China, because you also later on had this moment in the 80s, of the discovery of theory, of the transmission of theory perhaps more via the Unites States but still French and German continental theory. And then there comes a moment when we have those translations finally. A generation of students is familiar with this material. And therefore that task of transmission and translation is no longer an essential one. So one moves on. In this case, history itself—really with the expansion of the media, I would say, the democratization of this media, the spread of mass culture, mass culture literacy—encourages a turning in the direction of what’s now called cultural studies. Theory itself moves in that direction but it is still theoretical production. Perhaps today I think in globalization the major area of emphasis is that of political forms of finance capital, its relationship to power, the relationship of the various nation-states to the global system and so forth. That also becomes the occasion for theory, for the analysis of new moment in history and also for the analysis of new forms in history because with globalization new forms which I call postmodern forms come into being. So maybe there are several moments in that trajectory, but the emphasis for me has always been on this relationship between form and history and its expression in terms of what I call it Theory. If you would like to call it cognitive mapping, that would be another way of describing it.

He & Zhu: It seems to us that Sartre serves as the “beginning” as well as the constant background of your academic career. Sartre’s prestige as a public intellectual is indispensible from his emphasis on “intervention”. But paradoxically, while some poststructuralists in France either claim that intellectuals have already become extinct or announce they are ready to embrace their new roles known as “professional intellectuals”, humanities in America is concurrently witnessing a “political turn” which is still in full swing today. Should we say that the claim of intellectual autonomy and the emphasis on the liberating dimensions of academia are two intertwining but also contradicting tendencies? If we only focus on the utopianism of will, will the emphasis on the autonomy of academia be reduced into a kind of intellectual cynicism? Or, on the contrary, if we merely emphasize the liberating potentialities of the autonomy of academia itself, will it turn out to be a phony rebellion which is actually another form of co-optation? In short, what are the further moves should we make if we want “Theory” to be an effective way of “intervention” in a context in which “thinking” is becoming more and more institutionalized?

Jameson: Much of the debate on public intellectuals has involved a nostalgia for an older status of the political intellectual that maybe no longer exists. There are the transformations involved in the media and there are the transformations involved in politics itself, the mass party and so forth. And then I think it’s also very important to remember that the academy has undergone an enormous expansion, beginning in the 1960s, something true all over the world. There was a democratization of the universities which used to be a very elitist institution and which now touches all segments of the population. In the United States a great majority of young people expect to go to college. And therefore, when you talk pejoratively about academic intellectuals versus public intellectuals, I don’t think that really fits the situation any more. Academic intellectuals do have effect on significant masses of people. Meanwhile public intellectuals tend, like everything else, to become specialized, so that they are spokespersons in certain domains, obviously very important spokespersons very often, spokespeople for certain groups, for certain causes and so forth. But the overall public intellectuals are the world’s political leaders, maybe they are not.

People like Sartre who protested injustice is part of an older historical situation. We now have professionals to protest injustices and they are lobbyists. I guess it is rather cynical, what I am saying here. We must not judge either politics or intellectual life in terms of situations in the past. As for what we can do in the academic life, here I also want to be a little cynical and say that we have to first note the way in which private business and capitalism have penetrated certain disciplines. Of course here I am talking about the United States. There is an investment of businesses in academic research. Many businesses save money by having universities to do their research, something very notable in sciences. Meanwhile as I understand it the sciences themselves have become applied sciences. Even in the university, there is less and less theoretical pure science undertaken. And so on and so forth. We can see that political science departments and sociology departments are very much wrapped up in either practical politics or in foreign affairs which are themselves tangled up in capitalism and business and so forth. There are very few places anymore where there is real autonomy of thought in the university. The current advantages of the humanities are two-fold really: one is that we have inherited theory in the form of philosophical tradition as well. In the United States, the dominant traditions of both empiricism and also of Anglo-American analytic philosophy and so on have really meant that we in the humanities have inherited the great classics like Kant, Hegel and the Greeks, so on and so forth. It is an enormous wonderful expansion of our mission to be able to transmit both philosophy and the classics of literature and language, and also to mediate mass culture and popular culture to a certain degree.

But at the same time we are not practical, that is to say we don’t normally make money for people. That means of course business don’t invest very much in us. But that distance from business and from money gives us a certain freedom still, because we are not beholden to patrons, and therefore we can still pronounce ourselves on political or social subjects. It’s a dialectics of weakness and strength. I mean, we are really exceedingly powerless in our own fields in the humanities. But on the other hand that very powerlessness gives us a kind of intellectual freedom and freedom to speak, so on and so forth. I don’t want to exaggerate this dialectic. But it has to be born in mind when we think of intellectuals and their possibilities. If we were in a more practical discipline, we would face different problems, I think. Let’s take the fate of Marxist economists for example. If you have a Marxist economist in an economics department, he is generally a lone and embattled figure. Radical forms of political economy and their critique of the system do not generally find a home in so practical a field like economics. Therefore I admire those intellectuals very much. But we in the humanities are not really fortunately in that situation.

On the other hand, Sartre is the model of the political intellectuals worldwide. There can’t be any doubt about it. That has also to do with the variety of his interest, with his curiosity about the world and all kinds of other things. There seems to be a sort of renewal of interest in Sartre. But of course everything is specialized, so it is a renewal of interest among the Sartrians or specialists in Sartre which may be not so good. I believe there are still many features of Sartre that are unexplored. I have written extensively about theCritiqueofDialecticalReason. This is not a book that has really made its way in philosophy or political science. I think there are sections of his work on the relationship to the people and to group dynamics which are absolutely new and still very relevant and have not been sufficiently explored. I also have to say that if you give students the philosophy and novels of Sartre, even today students from a very different generation can still be electrified by these works. So Sartre’s influence is by no means at an end.

He & Zhu: Can we say that “late capitalism” is the most concise summary of your “cognitive mapping” of the contemporary social formation? Were you trying to imply something when you chose this particular word “late”? Can we establish certain logical links between your diagnosis with the current financial earthquake caused by subprime mortgage crisis on Wall Street? After the Beijing Olympic Games, while some mainstream American media announced that a “New Totalitarian Age” was coming, some others suggested that a new developmental mode which retains the centralization of state power but also has a free market at the same time, with China and Russia as its representatives, especially the former, would serve as the new model for other countries in the world to follow. There are subtle relationships between this new mode of governance and Marxism or socialism. What do you think of this since both China and the future of Marxism are your constant concerns? Can we say that the new economic and political models practiced by China and Russia are new developments of socialism or Marxist political economy?

Jameson: “Late capitalism” is a phrase used in German that I really derived from Ernest Mandel’s notion ofSpätkapitalismus. It was not necessarily meant to foretell the immediate end of capitalism, but simply to indicate that there were the early stages of capitalism, there was a national capitalism that Marx thought about, there was then the moment of imperialism, and now we are sort of in something new, you could also call it globalized capitalism. There are all kinds of ways of talking about this. On the other hand, it is also meant to designate the idea that capitalism has a life trajectory. And this organism is bound to come to an end at some point. And in Marx that end is much later than people generally imagine. I always refer to the passage inGrundrisse(the 1858 manuscripts) in which he conveys the idea that a genuine social transformation is really going to be possible only when a world market comes into being, in other words, when commodification is universal. That means when all of the older kinds of labor, tributary labor, traditional labor and so on, have been transformed into wage labor, and so in a way when all the spaces of the globe have been filled. And in a sense, this is now coming to pass. With the rapidity of late capitalism, and finance capitalism especially, this process is moving around the world much more rapidly than we have anticipated, in search of cheap labor. So American businesses leave the United States, they go to Mexico, for example, and establish there because the standard of living in Mexico is lower and therefore they can pay lower wages. But then other labor markets come into being: East Asia and finally China. Then all these Mexican companies move to China. But now there are signs that there are other parts of the world that offer cheaper labor than China. So this is a process of expansion in the search of cheap wage labor which is an ongoing one. But then finally Marx thought it would reach its limits when the whole world has been explored in that fashion. So “late” meant that kind of temporality and not something else. But on the other hand, the recent crisis shows that capitalism did not triumph with Reagan and Thatcher and neo-conservatism. But it is still very fragile. It is still a contradictory structure or organism of the kind Marx described.

You move then in your question from economics to politics, to the centralization of state power. I think one of the dogmas of the free market people was that markets and capitalism can only develop hand in hand with what we think of its political democracy that is a kind of parliamentary representation. This was never true in the case of Japan which was developed from above by central government, an authoritarian monarchy. And it is clearly not the case in China, where a party organized the development of capitalism. So it is clear that there is a disconnect between the capitalist markets and these political forms. The introduction of capitalism does not mean parliamentary democracy in the liberal sense. And the introduction of liberal democracy may not mean a flourishing market capitalism either, as we can see in other parts of the world. So I think one has to separate these two things. In fact we need a critique of liberalism and liberal ideology and its illusions. Marxism from my perspective is not a political philosophy, but an economic philosophy, even though Marx was interested in a variety of political forms in a very opportunistic way. It is obvious that socialism, if such a thing is possible, would be an immensely democratizing thing with a lot of popular participation. But that doesn’t mean that it will take the form of the American constitution which is a very conservative document. It doesn’t mean it will look like the English parliamentary system. It might not look like the Soviets either. The political forms of the future remain to be invented, it seems to me. From my perspective, they have to be reinvented along with a development of socialism. We don’t have that anywhere right now. So the political question really can’t be answered properly. But to insist on a connection between market capitalism and these western forms of parliamentary democracy is simply ideology. It’s the American and Anglo-American liberal ideology and it deserves to be criticized in its own way.

Russia is a very different matter, of course. Russia and East Europe were really the objects of tremendous plunder and theft by individual capitalists, whether they’re the communist managers themselves or Westerners in the case of East Germany. I think it was a very tragic situation, if you look at the misery caused in former Soviet Union. I won’t criticize China because China is a very different thing. But in China you also have the countryside and that is very serious. The cities’ prosperity needs to be extended in some way to the countryside, and it can’t possibly involve the kind of consumption and commodity you have on the coast. My worry would be that to make sure that the social safety net is extended to everybody. The unique life of the countryside needs to be preserved and developed. Because we are seeing that in India, there are revolts going on in the countryside as peasants’ land being sold out to capitalist factories and enterprises. That signal is a part of the world situation which has not been taken into account. Your new president immediately visited the countryside and made comments on its problems. That is obviously what the Chinese leadership has to take into account.

He & Zhu: Just now you said that the political forms of the future remained to be invented. Can you say something more about that? It is very interesting to us. In terms of that, what do you think of communism? Is communism an integral part of Marxism?

Jameson: Of course, we must technically distinguish what the word meant in Lenin’s theory, and what actually happened in the USSR. For convenience, I am using it in this second sense. Communism came into being in a crisis. Lenin had to cancel the First Congress of the Soviets. They had a crisis situation with the civil war; they had the mass starvation in the countryside; they had to face fascism. Meanwhile under Stalin the party itself which had been a relatively democratic institution ceased to be so. In the first years, Lenin was often contradicted by other members of the ruling committee. But for various reasons, Stalin did away with this kind of democratic institution. Communism from a political point of view never really developed in a kind of mass direction. It had many economic achievements. Think of a country like this, finally beating the Germans with all their industry and technology. It is amazing. Think of the process whereby the entire peasant population was made literate. Think of the scientific gains of the Soviet Union. Too many people forget what astonishing historical achievements those were. But in terms of politics, the party became ossified for all kinds of reasons. Is it possible for it to develop in new ways? I imagine so. Many political institutions evolved, but the party really did not evolve in the case of the Soviet Union. As I said, there are ideals of socialism and there are the historical experiences of communism. And those are obviously two different things. But those are great laboratory experiments which we must look at again in the future. But we are not in that future yet.

He & Zhu: Lukacs points out that only totality can help us see through the mist of reification. From books likeThePoliticalUnconscious, this concept has also drawn your attention in no less important ways. In your framework, “historicizing” serves as the way to achieve this goal. Do you agree that currently the task of “cognitive mapping” has become all the more difficult since we are now severely challenged by a “politics of depoliticization” as many scholars have asserted? What new phenomena will pose as obstacles to our new “cognitive mapping” according to your understanding? Is Lukacs’ reification still relevant today? If so, how can it relate to the current economic and cultural globalization? How can we have a totalizing or historical “cognitive mapping” under the new global context?

Jameson: Lukacs talked about an “aspiration to totality”. I think there are several things involved: first of all, a totality is not something that anybody can see or represent. The whole point of totality is that it is beyond individual imagination. Lukacs wanted to say that in a way working class people are able to have better sense of what is going on in the economy like this because they feel the full weight of the economy, exploitations and so forth. Then for the middle class people, their vision of the system is limited because they are profiting from it in various ways. This is one of the things Luckas meant by reification. So it is easier for working class people to see how everything functions, and to grasp the totality of society. Now when he talks about thinking and representation and so forth, his phrase is “the aspiration to totality”, that means that you attempt to make connections, you attempt to map in a cognitive way, and you attempt to put together all the pieces of the puzzle. But it doesn’t imply that anybody could actually do that. It doesn’t imply that anybody is in a position to see the totality of things. So when people attack totalizing thought, they imply that you claim to have a view from above, but no one really has that, not even the people you think of as rulers or dictators. People in power like Stalin, Lenin or Roosevelt might have an aspiration to the totality, but did they see the totality? No, they saw a room with some telephones and assistants coming in and out with papers and reports and so forth. So it remains that cognitive mapping is just that—an aspiration and not a reality. This is even more the case with globalization because globalization is even a bigger thing than any imperial system and even more difficult to map or to grasp as totality. That is why it seems to me that right now the various arts and theory itself are in an interesting moment because they are attempting to devise new ways of seeing, grasping, thinking and approaching this new totality in some way. That’s not easy. We have no precedents. The earlier moments of history have been about much smaller spaces. Some people substitute images, for example, one of the most popular current images of the totality is the internet. The internet is this disembodied set of relationships between all these computers and all these people. Well, that’s a figure; that is an image. It is very clear that it is an attempt to see all the connections. But obviously there are a lot of things going on in the world system that you can’t really grasp through that. That image tends to be very positive and utopian. That is a utopia because the media and internet people who see all this as another immense democracy of some sort. From one perspective, it is. But from another, it is also a mode of control.

So globalization is a very interesting new historical problem and situation for us. We are severely challenged by politics of depoliticization, as you say. Yes. Without being able to map the situation, it is very hard to know where the possibilities of changing are. And this has its practical sides. On the one hand, capitalism has to a certain degree become unified in its global form. But you can see from the current banking crisis that this is a very contradictory unification. Now on the other hand, in the great moments of the previous system, labor was able at least partially be unified. So you had the great moments of labor unification, of making the labor unions, of establishing international labor connections and international labor movements, of which communism was of course one. That has yet to happen on a global scale today and the movement seems to be greatly weakened in the older countries. And there are whole segments of the world that are structurally unemployed. So that global unification of labor has yet taken place. But obviously in the future that’s gradually going to happen as well. Yet only at that point people will see the things to be done. It is possible, people on the left now want to suggest. I think it is not impossible, that maybe ecological politics will make that possible for a future unification. Nevertheless, it will unite various segments of the world population around itself. Maybe on the contrary it will make it more difficult, I don’t know. That is a whole new part of late capitalism and its dilemmas that has not yet fully come into being. I think it’s essentially powerlessness that makes for depoliticization. If people see that there is nothing they can do, then they become discouraged and that is what you call “being depoliticized”. When people then discover possibilities of action, then I think that kind of discouragement can be reversed.

He & Zhu: In “The End of Temporality”, you seem to suggest that space has become the key category for us to conceptualize the world. How should we understand the relationship between space and totality in the new situation? Can we say that “spatializing” is now the new approach to totality rather than “historicizing” as you once claimed inThePoliticalUnconscious?

Jameson: Many people now tend to see totality in terms of space because we are so dominated by conceptions and categories of space. But we have to try to think of space more abstractly and to develop the right categories for the thinking of space. The same is true of time. There have always been spatial conception of the time, but clearly now we begin to think of time in a new and more spatial way. Can we reinvent the notion of time? And today we have to see history in our more spatial way of seeing things. How can we think and rethink history in these terms? I think it’s not easy to do that. If we are to have a conception of totality today, it has to be different from the modernist one. All this is still a question; it is not an answer yet.

He & Zhu: You are the most important Marxist critic in America while Raymond Williams can be your counterpart in England. Both of you pushed Marxism forward. How to conceptualize the similarities as well as differences between you two? Can we say that from Marx’s “historical materialism”, you chiefly picked out the idea of “history” and developed it while Williams mainly inherited Marx’s “materialism” (especially in the latter period of his academic career). As a result, you two formulated quite different theoretical frameworks. Is this question appropriate? If so, how should we understand the tension between “Always historicizing” and “history as non-representable”?

Jameson: I have always found that the situation here and that of England were very different, though Raymond Williams was never tired of saying that he was not English but Welsh. But he also came out of a situation in which unions were still very strong. He was of another generation and he was active in British communist party. The British party was very small but had a good deal of influence on the left and in the unions and labor party. His situation was different from that of our own left. He also thought it possible to revive traditions of collectivity both in the factories and in the countryside. That it seemed to me we never really had that here or we have lost it to a much greater degree. Remember that the American left has been wiped out several times in its history. First the socialist movement before World War One became very powerful, and then after World War One, it was persecuted and wiped out. Then the communist party came into being in the 20s and 30s. It was very powerful in a different way, and it was the forefront of unionization. It flourished under the New Deal. The New Deal made a lot of accomplishments possible for the American communist party. But then a number of things hit it of course. The Stalin-Hitler pact was disastrous for CPUSA. At the end of the war, anti-communism, McCarthyism and the persecution of fellow travelers and so on effectively wiped it out. The New Left in Vietnam period was much more successful. The government lost that war, unlike the other two. Therefore, the government was not able to wipe out the left movement. So veterans of the new left really began to take over the culture and the university as well. Another left tradition was implanted. Obviously I have benefited from it as much as anybody else. But I think it has been more sapped by neo-conservatism and free market moment and the destruction of the welfare state than by failure in wartime. But the British had a socialist movement and their achievements after World War Ⅱ were very considerable. So it was a question of building on those achievements, rather than as in our case, starting from the ground up and reinventing the Left all together. So the situations that we addressed were very different. I only met Raymond once, but I admired him. As intellectuals, we are drawn far more to France, Italy, Germany and Japan than what was going on in Britain. For him, it was very important to create a British Marxism, I think. While in our situations, we were more interested in drawing on another national currency over here. There may be other things to talk about, but that is what I would say about this parallel between my work and that of Raymond Williams.

He & Zhu: To distinguish the heterogeneities of culture within the same era, Williams made a distinction between the residual, the dominant and the emergent while your concept “cultural revolution” also shows that diachronically formed ideas can co-exist synchronically. Thus tension can be perceived between both these two theorizations and the proposition “economic base determines the superstructure” proposed by Marx. If so, how are we to understand the tension between “structuralism” and “humanism”?

Jameson: As for this formula “base determines superstructure”, I don’t assume we should get rid of this though as some people suggest it is an embarrassment or it is old-fashioned. I thought that in our situation over here, we shouldn’t get rid of it and because academics are only too happy to stop thinking about the economic base and that is what they ought to be thinking about. But we should always take it as a problem rather than a solution. The “belief” in “base and superstructure” always seemed to posit some pre-established relationship there. I don’t think that at all. It seems to me that is a question. When one is analyzing the superstructure or a cultural level, the first question is what the economic context is and how that relationship is possible. Sometimes it is a relationship to the past, the “residual” relationships (Raymond’s wonderful term and idea); sometimes it is even a relationship to the future, utopian or “emergent” relationships. It is never laid down in advance. I think if we think of it as a problem, how we establish that connection, then we can do much more productive things. And to be sure, if these words are old-fashioned and they bore people, then let’s forget about them and say it in another way. But I think it remains a useful problem.

We can now draw on structuralism without being involved in the debates of those days. Humanism obviously can mean all kinds of things. I generally understand it to mean individualism; then in that case I think we need to be critical of the ideology of individualism and lay stress on the collective. Does it mean you are against people and in favor of the system? I think that is a misunderstanding of anti-humanism. Maybe there could be anti-humanism like that; but I am always thinking in practical terms. It seems to me that the defense of humanism today has not been a very progressive thing. Generally when people defend humanism they want to attack something like communism, sometimes other political ideologies. And therefore I haven’t found it productive to use the slogan of humanism. Sartre did find it productive in existentialism right after the war. He thought it was important to affirm a humanistic perspective. But in my opinion in our current situation it doesn’t have much function. Neither does the slogan of democracy because it is tainted, it is the property of capitalism and it is the property of the government. So to push democracy on the Left is always to raise misunderstandings and to play into the hands of people who are using these slogans in very different ways. But this is my political judgment, others can have other judgments. And mine may very well be wrong and maybe humanism today would be a powerful slogan. But it has to be a productive slogan and it has to lead to a development of left politics, and not simply mark a stopping point or some kind of ethical piety, or even worse, a position which is anti-socialist.

He & Zhu: A related question is that how to understand Althusser’s “structural causality”. As some may suggest, your attitude towards structuralist Marxism is somewhat ambiguous while Williams is obviously more skeptical.

Jameson: What Althusser wanted to do is to get away from the old vulgar Marxist idea concerning “base and superstructure”. Vulgar Marxism holds that economic is the ultimate determining instance and everything expresses the economic. He wanted to get away from that. The economic is simply one part of the structure as a whole. It is the whole structure which is the base and is not just the economic. The ultimate determining instance is what is called the mode of production. The mode of production is not just the economic. It is the economic and the cultural. Each mode of production stages a different relationship between production, culture, psyche, space and time. The whole mode of production is the ultimate determining instance, if you like. That’s what Althusser means. Actually this question somewhat overlaps with the Raymond Williams’ one.

But the Althusserians themselves tended to evolve away from this. Let’s take Laclau and Mouffe’s “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy” as an example. They tend to say the economic may be there or not and we don’t always need a politics based on the economic. In practical political terms, I agree with that. But I do believe the mode of production is dominant in all these cases. It forms the shape of what political action can be and can’t be. From their point of view, then that rendered all Marxism obsolete. I wouldn’t say however that I am a structural Marxist though structuralism has always been very important for me. In my new book, I have tried to explain that the structuralists like Levi-Strauss really, in some sense, began to reinvent the dialectic for us. We have to do with the dialectic today coming out of structuralism. And Althusser is part of that.

He & Zhu: We notice that you have based most of your theoretical formulations on detailed analysis of literary texts. Now many people complain that “literary studies” or “literary theory” is becoming more and more irrelevant or disconnected with actual literary works and they begin to advocate a return to literature itself. A well-known example is Harold Bloom who not only calls for a return to the “aesthetics” of literature, but also refers to those colleagues who politicize literature as the “school of resentment”. RecentlyNewYorkTimesalso carries articles about how to replace the “Left University” with the “Right University”. What is your position facing controversy like this? One more thing is that in one of your articles, you call for the shifts from individual textual analysis to mode-of-production analysis. Can we infer from this that probably the focus of our studies will not be literature in the near future with the changed historical situation? Can or should literature avoid the fate of becoming a mere illustration of politics or a footnote to “Theory”?

Jameson: In Frenchressentimentis the word for resentment and probably it means something more specific than resentment in English. The people who talk about resentment are generally activated by resentment, so it is a vicious circle and not very helpful. It is very misleading for all these people to claim that we have abandoned literature. They had two targets in view: one was theory; the other was cultural studies. Of course it’s important to come back to the works themselves. But we have to remember that a large segment of the modernist canon is a historical one and demands historical contexts and historical approaches. This is in reality a pedagogical question about what the universities should teach. And I still very much teach literature. But to use literature as a tool to attack the study of philosophical or theoretical texts, or to attack the study of cultural texts, I think this is a misuse of this slogan.

We can also approach this problem from a theoretical point of view. In the system of the fine arts that is emerging in postmodernity or in globalization, literature is not the central art as it used to be. In modernism, the central art was not just literature, but poetic language. Around poetic language, there is a cluster of other arts. And the other arts are inspired to the condition of poetic language. Actually I worked on novels and that was then a more peripheral concern. The founding ideology of modernism always has to do with poetry. Narratives and novels were seriously and theoretically addressed by people who only began with Northrop Frye in the 1950s (leaving the Russians out of it). But I would say that now the center of gravity has moved away from poetic language which is no longer valorized as something that can be purified in this new world. Rather, it moved in the direction of space, including the space of the image, and therefore poetry is subordinated to that and the novel is subordinated to that. If we want to understand the kinds of texts, novels, films and so on that being produced today, we have to think a little more seriously about that whole new configuration of the arts. This is not a turning towards mass culture; some of these products are very sophisticated. But it is suggesting that the literature these people are talking about is the literature of the past and of tradition. We can only go back to that if we understand the dynamics of our own cultural situation today. Then we can look again at modernist literature and see it in new ways. I have been trying to do that. I have worked on modernism and now I am working on realism, the 19th century novels. But I am coming to it from the present, and not from an antiquarian perspective. One has got to have a dual perspective: that is to see the work in its own situation and then also in connection with ours.

I would also say something about the idea of judging the greatness of things and about the construction of a canon. From my point of view, everything is constructed. We have heard that the tradition was constructed; we have heard the psyche is constructed; and the canon is also constructed. I think it’s impossible not to construct the canon. People don’t read junk because it is junk. They don’t see TV shows because they are worthless. They try to get something out of them that has some value. But if you are going to teach those things, you need a kind of canon: we have done that in connection with science fiction. You pick the things that are best in that tradition, so you construct some kind of canon. Then maybe later on you have better books to deal with, the canon changes. But it always has to be understood that it is a historical canon and a provisional canon. Just as certainly as it has been constructed it also has got to be got rid of and replaced. This question is, I think, a little bit old-fashioned now.

The study of literature is of course political. Everything is political nowadays, so of course literature is also political. But we still read novels or poems today. You cannot think of any great poets in the modern period who are not political, therefore they have to be read politically in that way that may have to be invented.

He & Zhu: Let’s keep to the topic of literature. In your famous article about “third-world literature”, you state that all literature from the third-world are political and thus can be interpreted as national allegories. Interestingly in Deleuze’s theorization, “minor literature” is also endowed with similar functions. So far as this point is concerned, can we say that “great minds think alike”? This article has been frequently referred to in China, but it has also incurred criticisms from some. Can we use Deleuze’s ideas of literature to respond to such criticisms?

Jameson: It has to be understood that this article was written in a period in which third world literature was in a specific founding stage. It was the moment of the founding of the newly independent third world countries, for example, the decolonization of Africa, the coming into being of the independent African states. That generated a certain generation of books, many of them autobiographical, which corresponded to the construction of the nation. It was a period of a nationalism which also has socialist and welfare state leanings which wanted to be a transformation of the old colonial situations, and so on. Of course we have moved on. Now there have been many historical stages since that one which is no longer with us (unfortunately). In the third world as well as other places, other kinds of literatures are being written, but those are also allegories. They may be the allegories of tribes; they may be gender allegories; they may be race or ethnic allegories and so on. What I wanted to say was simply that, in the United States, at the center, there is a certain blindness. In a wealthy country like this, we are able very so often to forget politics because we don’t have to think about it. But in other parts of the world people can’t forget politics, so when they tell their individual stories, the stories of their own personal destinies, those remain political stories because their individual destinies are fatally tied into the political situations. That is what I mean by allegories. I think that it is still very valid. But it has taken all kinds of new forms since I first wrote that article.

With Deleuze, I think there are various kinds of things, one must say. I think the notion of “minor literatures” is probably itself historical and only corresponds to certain historical moments; there is a moment when minorities and minority revolt are culturally productive. I don’t necessarily endorse his dualism, as for example, in the opposition of nomads versus the state. I think the state is also in decay and I don’t think the state produces culture of a very vital type in any way. It just produces propaganda if it produces anything. All genuine cultural production comes from below, in one way or the other. You can see that in this country, with the production of black music, for example, it comes out of the ghetto. Then of course the big record companies grab it, they commercialize it and introduce it to the media, and it becomes absorbed in the general culture. But I think that culture does tend to come from below. But maybe not exactly in the way Deleuze was thinking about it.

Deleuze says something else which I like a lot. First of all he says, “nationalisms are always good until they come into power, then they are horrible and we must oppose them.” I endorse that there is something positive to be said for collective movements which are often nationalistic. But when collective movements come to power, then we have to be very cautious and take our distance. He also says in his film books that in any movement of this kind, any populist movement around collectivity, the people is always yet to be constructed. The people doesn’t exist. The collectivity does not yet exist even when this movement is strong. It always has to be brought into being. These political movements are movements that wish to bring new collectivities into being. You can relate some of those ideas up with what we were saying about politics a moment ago, that is, political forms have to be brought into being, they don’t exist yet. That’s the part of Deleuze’s politics that I feel closer to than the notion of minor literature, which has known a tremendous success in the era of identity politics. I don’t completely associate myself with that, although I sympathize.

He & Zhu: InThePoliticalUnconscious, you described the connection between market capitalism and realism, monopoly capitalism and modernism, and late capitalism and postmodernism respectively. Can there be a place reserved for the connection between socialism and socialist realism in this framework? Or is it because that there are no fit conditions for the analysis of political unconscious because politics is always conscious in socialist society? How do you understand the writings produced in socialist countries? Is this a kind of writing developed dialectically and one which forms its own inherent dialectics in the process or just a myth? Some people think that it is a myth while others hold that it is a total failure. What do you think of these different attitudes?

Jameson: I wouldn’t want to use the term socialist realism, but let’s say several things. I have been vey much influenced by Katerina Clark’s work on Soviet literature. According to her, what is called socialist realism was a popular literature in a country that did not have mass culture. It became a mass culture and it has to be looked at from that standpoint, not as avant-garde aesthetics, but really as mass culture, with all the relationships to melodrama, exaggeration, heroes and villains and so forth that are involved in this kind of mass culture. Probably it will hold for China too. Stalin was a true intellectual and had an immense library and read prodigiously. He had all kinds of literary interests. We find now that he is a great Gorgian poet. Some of his poems written in his youth in the Gorgian language are still read and sung today in Georgia. So Stalin is more complicated than people think. But before the break of 1934 and that imposition of socialist realism which essentially puts an end to all the great modernist movements that were going on in the Soviet 20s there—there flourished what I would call the Soviet Cultural Revolution, because it was a true cultural revolution during which all kinds of things were happening in the cultural sphere. There you had what I would want to call a socialist modernism, all kinds of modernist tendencies. Adorno observes somewhere that before the Stalinist consolidation no one thought there was any incompatibility between avant-garde art and vanguard politics. Those two things went together. It is only later on that modernism splits up and often has a reactionary or even fascist tenor as with Eliot and Pound. And avant-garde politics also goes in another direction and so forth. So of course there was a socialist modernism. Our question now is whether there could be some kind of left or socialist postmodernism. I think postmodernism or postmodern art today has become much more political than it was in its beginnings in the early 80s when I lectured in China on all this.

Now you mention the writings produced in socialist countries. Obviously in China now there is a tremendous variety of things going on. But my sense of it is that you are moving towards to a much more mass cultural art, a kind of punk art and so on and so forth. Maybe you are moving beyond that. But certainly there is postmodernism in China. Whether that can be called socialist postmodernist art, I cannot say. But in Cuba, of course, there is also this tremendous variety of styles and forms, Fidel said “whoever is not against us is with us”. He said “we do not endorse Soviet aesthetics. If you are for the revolution, you can do anything aesthetically you want”. If you go to Cuban art shows at any time, you can see all kinds of arts from abstract art to the famous Chinese wood block political art. All of that flourishes in Cuba. They have a very lively innovative socialist or political cinema and a very lively political literature as well. But one of the hangovers of the socialist left movements is this business of dictating to the artists what they should be doing and what political art should be. I have tried never to do that. Unless we are doing the art ourselves, I don’t think we intellectuals have any authority to do that. Maybe right now our aesthetics should be more of Hegel’s idea of the owl of Minerva’s flying at dusk. We are there to see the art being produced; we are not to tell artists what to do. That would be another difference with Raymond Williams. Raymond Williams himself was a novelist and he knew what should be done and he took sides. I don’t do that much.

Of all of those different kinds of art, I think realism is one. There is certainly a place for realism and realism exists very much. And I am trying now to theorize these things.

He & Zhu: According to your article “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?”, “Theory” has gone through three moments which are structuralism, poststructuralism and the political moment respectively. We are now still in the political stage but you predict that it will enter its fourth moment which will take the theorizing of collective subjectivities as its primary objectives. This analysis is quite illuminating. Your own theoretical formulation also has its history of development. Can we roughly divide your academic career like this: in the first period you are mainly concerned with Marxist theory; then you turn to cultural studies or the “cognitive mapping” of the contemporary social form; recently your books likeTheModernistPapersseem to suggest that you have entered into another period, that is the study of modernism (or returned to the study of modernism, if we take your earlier works on modernism into consideration). Is this another turn in your academic career, though the division can never be absolute? Is it possible for you to tell us something about your current and possible future academic concerns? For example, what theoretical methodology will you employ in the new context to “map” collective subjectivities, the historical pressures involved in their construction and activation, as well as their new tasks?

Jameson: As for the periodization of my recent, more systematic work, I started with postmodernism; I jumped to a kind of future in my work of science fiction; then I went back to modernism; now I am working on realism; then I will go back to allegory, and finally maybe to myth. This trajectory is one that is going away from the present. But one does not want to become antiquarian about this, I will certainly go on writing about contemporary things. I am interested in, for example, in connection with realism: what is a historical novel and what can it be today, can there be a postmodern historical novel, how do we look at history today in the age of globalization, how do we write about it and represent it? It seems to me that is a very exciting topic. And it’s one that unites the present and the past.

Now let’s say something about the mapping of collective subjectivities. The first thing to understand is that there are a lot of them going on around the world. And to look at the varieties of these subjectivities is also to look at the structures. I am very much concerned with finance capitalism, its relationship to abstraction and its relationship to cultural production even. And I think we have to come to terms with that. That is a collective subjectivity in the sense that there is a postmodern mind-set in such financial operations. There is computer literacy in every country of the world. People have asked me, in Latin America for example, how we can talk about postmodernity when we are not modern yet. But the notion of modernity is a political fetish. It has been used all over the world as a kind of return to liberalism and so on. I have tried to criticize that, I don’t know whether anyone is paying attention. There is no country in the world that doesn’t have postmodern strata of some sort; that doesn’t have computers; that isn’t somehow tied in the financial system. But we have got to think about these in new ways. I do not at all repudiate the study of the present or even the future. But now I am hoping that one can look back and construct a different kind of past.

He & Zhu: On various occasions, you have repeatedly maintained that utopia and ideology are always the two sides of the same project. According to our reading, it seems that in the earlier period of your academic career, ideology has been your primary concern, but recently “utopia” seems to have become a more important concern for you. Is there such a change of academic emphasis?

Jameson: Yes. I think that’s very perceptive and quite true. Utopia and ideology are these two faces of any cultural production. These are political decisions in the larger sense of the world. It seems to me it used to be politically important for people to realize that literature and philosophy were ideological because people didn’t want to think that in the old days. Now everybody realizes that ideology is everywhere, even if they don’t like to use the term. So maybe it is more important to insist on the utopian side of things. But I still believe that both are intertwined and you can not really talk well about one without the other. And my theory of mass culture really involves that. In order to manipulate people ideologically, you really have to have utopian content to the work, because the utopian is what draws people. And so one can cast a spell on them and take them into another direction ideologically only by activating this utopian core. In that sense they are connected. By the same token, for utopias to have power they have to speak the language of a group and that’s always an ideological language. We are never going to have a situation where we all share exactly the same utopian vision. That would be an empty signifier. I mean the notion of hope, what Obama has said. Everybody reads into it whatever their collective ideologies call for. But the utopian will always be expressed in terms of the specific ideological languages of the various groups.

He & Zhu: You are one of the most widely read and talked about western scholars in China. Besides, your friendliness towards China is also well-known in the academia. Your last trip to China was to attend the international conference on “Critical Inquiry: Ends of Theory?” at Tsinghua University in 2004 and you haven’t been to China ever since. But you are still concerned with the development as well as the problems in China. Would you please make some comments on Chinese literature, literary criticism or even the contemporary politics? You know, this might have great impacts on the study of literature and literary theory in China in the next few years?

Jameson: Yes. I am still very interested in China. It seems to me what happens in China remains extremely important. I suppose nowadays the emphasis in China has shifted to politics and economics as much as anything else, that is, with what China decides to do with its money, what Chinese factories do and what it has produced, so on and so forth, and people are paying less attention to culture. I don’t really know what’s happening in China so much today. We are getting some translations of literary works and newer things. But one ofourproblemshasbeenthatwearenothavingenoughtranslationsbyqualifiedpeopleofChineseliterature.Whathasbeenmoreimmediateformostofushasbeenfilm.ChinesefilmswereextremelycreativeaftertheCulturalRevolution.Duetohistoricalreasons,Chinesefilmshavebeennotasinventiveasbefore.Butcertainlyitisgoingtocomeback.YoustillhaveaveryinterestingfilmdirectorthatIknow,thatisJiaZhangke.Whathedoeshasbeenintheforefrontofanythingthathasbeendoneinthefieldofcinema.AndfromwhatZhangYimoudidattheOlympics,wecanalsoseethatthereisstillplentyofcreativityinChina.

I have travelled in China quite a lot and those trips are extremely interesting for me. I haven’t been over for a while, but in the future I will certainly go back to China because there is always a lot to see for me.

附注:

① Special thanks should be given to Prof. Chen Yongguo, Hu Yamin and Wu Qiong who have given their help in various ways in the preparation of the interview questions. We are also indebted to Prof. Jameson’s student Koonyong Kim for his warm-hearted help and valuable suggestions in the process of interviewing and editing.