Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :The Political Unconscious (1981)
This book will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts. It conceives of the political perspective as not as some supplementary method, not as an optional auxiliary to other interpretative methods current today—the psychoanalytic or the myth-critical, the stylistic, the ethical, the structural—but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading and interpretation.
Thou shalt have no other god but Marx. For Marxists, the class struggle is a jealous deity.
Well, okay. So what Jameson is actually arguing is that Marxist theory is the first among equals. It is not the only theory—just the best. And why is that? Well, if you ask Jameson, it's because Marxism is objective. It's true. It's the way things are. Right? Right?
So, sure, you can dabble in some feminism or some psychoanalysis if you want, but you should probably try to fit them within Marxist theory somehow if you want to be legit.
Quote :The Political Unconscious (1981)
History is therefore the experience of necessity. […] History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis…
Grrr, feel the burn. History might hurt, but Marx wears historical UnderArmor. No pain, no gain.
Jameson's point: Literature is not real. History is real. And when the two meet, it is literature that must give way.
The conclusion: literature's value is based on its relationship to history. It doesn't have its own intrinsic value. A novel is good because it accurately or objectively reflects specific historical situations, not because it has pretty language or memorable characters or an original message.
Quote :Marxism and Form (1971)
For the most part, and particularly in the United States, the development of postindustrial monopoly capitalism has brought with it an increasing occultation [magicking away] of the class structure through techniques of mystification practiced by the media and particularly by advertising. […] As a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work on the world that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience.
If all that class-struggle stuff seemed a bit far-fetched, this is why. "What is this new devilry!" rumbles Marx from his grave, as another Tweet is sent. In the 21st century, there is black magic afoot.
That word occultation is revealing—we're talking, like, the occult. Television, cinema, the internet—for Marxists these are just tricksier and tricksier ways of bedeviling you little hobbits.
But why? Does Twitter exist just to shrink our tiny minds even further? Well, Jameson would say that it exists in order to mask the true relations of production.
Huh?
Basically, Jameson's point is that the reason you can't see the class struggle is… because the capitalists hid it. Jameson himself only knows it's there because he can see through ideology. Skeptical? All right. But think: where is your car made? Your clothes? How much are the people who make it being paid? And how rich are the people that pay them? Like supermarket chicken, everything we own has to come from somewhere…
While you're pondering that, ask yourself: what part does literature play in all this? Does it help us see larger patterns in society? Does it help us see through ideology? Does it get us concerned about where are products and services come from, or does it encourage us to think that iPhones grow on Apple trees?