Credit: Jared Lazarus, Duke University (2013)
- 1 See Richard T. De George and Fernande De George’s, The Structuralists: From Marx to Levi-Strauss (1 (...)
1While the Johns Hopkins symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” saw the likes of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Tzvetan Todorov address an audience of American academics in 1966, the American life of “French Theory” took shape in journals, edited collections, and via visiting professorships over the course of the following decades. In the 1970s, thinkers associated with structuralism found their way into journals like Yale French Studies, The Partisan Review, Diacritics, Glyph, SubStance, Social Text, and Semiotext(e), half of which were born to accommodate French texts and trends over the course of the decade. Between 1970 and 1972, no fewer than five edited collections were assembled, offering surveys and introductory assessments of structuralism.1 In his introduction to The Quest for Mind: Piaget, Lévi-Strauss and the Structuralist Movement, psychologist Howard Gardner characterizes the disoriented fervor of Structuralism’s Anglo-American origins as follows:
Structuralism is the most influential–yet least understood–intellectual
movement of our time. Least understood because writers have characterized
its methods instead of demonstrating them; named three dozen structuralists
without describing any one in detail; assumed ignorance on the part of the
public about current findings while assuming omniscience concerning
structuralism itself and those disciplines to which it applies (i).
2While his assessment of the nature and quality of American scholarship on structuralism at this juncture is very much on the mark, Fredric Jameson’s Prison House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972), published in the same year as Gardner’s collection, stands out as a notable exception.
3Divided in three, Jameson’s book engages Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic model before examining Russian Formalism and French Structuralism in turn. In Russian Formalism, Jameson identifies a movement that has great difficulty with literary history and actual, non-mechanistic change: each literary work is an instance of parole to be read against the langue of literature. The book’s lengthy section on Structuralism, which comprises almost half of the book, works through French Structuralism’s prime movers–Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Algirdas Greimas, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Tzvetan Todorov–in intensive passages that situate individual texts within the context of a larger set of intellectual trends. While Jameson’s most explicit and repeated concern is the place of time and history in the face of synchronic analyses, his book ultimately advocates, via the dialectical imagination, the creation of a liberatory hermeneutic that can resolve the incommensurabilities abound in the prison house of a linguistic turn: if only “the demands of synchronic analysis and historical awareness, of structure and self-consciousness, language and history, can be reconciled,” Jameson argues, a “genuine hermeneutic” can be born (1972 216).
4Jameson’s career is largely based on making Marx and Hegel–historical materialism and idealism–cohere in his desire for utopia. Jameson understands that thought is produced at, and productive of, the material base rather than being part of an ideological superstructure. Jameson is a scholar who thinks about economics and literature, the stages of capitalist development and the correspondent evolution of new modes of cultural expression. Jameson begins his preface to Marxism and Form, written at the same time as The Prison House of Language, by pointing out that American readers imagining Marxist literary criticism would inevitably recall the 1930s, when Marxist criticism “was of a relatively untheoretical, essentially didactic nature, destined more for use in the night school than in the graduate seminar” (1974 ix). French and German thought–destined more for the graduate seminar than the night school–were integral to Jameson’s revival of Marxism in American literary and cultural theory.
5In our interview, Jameson identifies the departmental structures and travel itineraries that fostered spirited exchanges regarding Marxism–the state of Marxist philosophy, in particular–against a backdrop of student unrest, border movements, and wars of national liberation. Not only does the interview capture the excitement of an engaged scholar working to revive Marxist literary criticism by making the University of California–San Diego French department into a Southern Californian hub for French Marxist visitors, but it also demonstrates the orthodoxy of a budding totalizer who was suspicious of some of the more strategic developments that were abound during the ‘68 years.
- 2 See Jason Demers, The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault (...)
6My own research has tended in the direction of these more strategic, rapid-fire, on the ground translations of a Marxism that often veered towards anarchism in a clustered set of exchanges between Paris and New York,2 but this West Coast hub remains a significant piece of the French-American puzzle. While the intellectual, political, and geographical points reproduced below could be reduced to coordinate points within an individual intellectual itinerary, I would hasten to argue that they instead constitute nodes in a network of thinkers and actors that hopefully pull us away from this temptation, or from the equally reductive temptation to reify French-American relations as those privileged geographic sites (Paris & New York), translated texts, and trajectories of influence that have come to define the American life of French theory. As Jameson reminds us, the political unconscious is spatially bound: San Diego isn’t Paris, and New York isn’t a synecdoche for the United States. Jameson’s life work also teaches us that once constituent parts are accounted for, it is by way of synthesis that we might forge our way to utopia.
Jason Demers: You started dealing with what has come to be known as “French Theory” quite early on. You wrote your dissertation on Jean-Paul Sartre, and in the early seventies, you published The Prison House of Language, half of which is devoted to French structuralism. The early seventies marked the very beginning of this American obsession with the new French method, but most of what was being published at this point was edited collections–translations of primary texts. Where secondary texts appeared, the essays, for the most part, were devoted to summary work. In comparison, your 1972 book was quite nuanced. How did you come into contact with the work of French intellectuals?
Fredric Jameson: At Harvard I had some connections to René Girard, who had been a teacher of mine for a few years. He steered me in some directions in the sixties because he knew Derrida at a point when Derrida was not very well known. I had another teacher, a novelist that I met in Paris in the sixties, and I would ask him what people were talking about in Paris at the time. One year he told me that everybody was interested in an academic book on linguistics called Course in General Linguistics by Saussure. Of course I’d never heard of Saussure at that point. That must have been around 1965. Because of these connections, I had a sense of what people were doing quite early on. So I tried to figure out why these people were so excited by Saussure. I had just been in San Diego for about a year, and then I had a sabbatical in 1969, so I went to Paris, and most of the material that deals with structuralism, in Prison House, was written then. I had access to people there. I tried to go to a Lacan seminar once, but, when his seminar was about to begin, he waltzed in, said that he was sick, and that we’d resume the next week. Where I did go quite often was Greimas’s seminar, which was like a clearing house for all sorts of ideas. Some interesting things were going on in his seminar, but it stopped being interesting when Greimas got annoyed and excommunicated the psychoanalysts and Lacanians from his group. After that, the seminar ceased to be a vital space where all of these things would productively collide.
JD: When considering the early entry of “French Theory” into the United States, during the sixties and seventies, the most obvious intercontinental visits that mark this entry are the Baltimore conference on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” in 1966 and the “Schizo-Culture” conference in 1975, a conference that grew out of the work that Sylvère Lotringer was beginning to do in Columbia’s French department, bringing French philosophers to New York. But there were also a number of significant visits throughout the seventies at the University of California in San Diego, where you were working at the time.
FJ: We had a different relationship with theory–a different kind of history in San Diego–than in New York, or at Columbia. But we were the first place to invite a lot of people like Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard to the United States in the seventies. A semiotician of painting and scholar of Jansenism, who had been in Paris in ‘68, Louis Marin, came and stayed for a long period. He knew everybody in Paris and he made a lot of connections for us. He secured the Lyotard visits and he was also very close to Michel de Certeau, who visited every once in a while (and was my successor when I left San Diego). Henri Lefebvre also came. Both Jacques Leenhardt, a student of Lucien Goldmann who was working on the sociology of literature, and Françoise Gaillard, most of whose work was on the 19th Century, but very theoretical, visited frequently and kept us informed about the currents. We had a Lacanian psychoanalyst one year, Yves Buin. There were lots of different connections with Lacanians. So our relationship to France was rather direct; I think we had a much better idea of what was going on than on a lot of other campuses in the United States.
Our situation, in the Literature Department at UCSD, was a unique one (which we were able at least partially to reproduce at Duke later on); and it allowed us to invite people from abroad for long and sometimes repeated visits: it’s very important to have direct contact of that kind with other cultures and national situations.
The American system, as far as French Departments were concerned, was very advantageous because it allowed us to explore these things. The situation was different in the United States than in Britain, where faculty were just supposed to teach French literature and that was it. At San Diego, we were very interested in semiotics, in psychoanalysis, in criticism of all kinds, and then, of course, in politics, because it was inseparable from theory. I arrived in San Diego late in 1968, and Herbert Marcuse, a colleague who had been in Paris in May, gave us reports. He had actually recorded what was happening in the streets underneath his window, and it was exciting to see and discuss these things, so we had another direct contact with political and historical realities.
JD: At the beginning of a slightly later book, The Political Unconscious, you begin with the slogan “always historicize!” You talk about how Marcuse was coming back and telling you about what was happening in Paris in May, and ’68 isn’t mentioned in Prison House of Language.
FJ: No, that’s true. There’s very little in the way of political or historical background in Prison House. It had been written as a long essay and was really supposed to be a part of Marxism and Form, but the publisher suggested we make two books out the manuscript. So, one could argue that it was the length that prohibited political background from entering into it. But, in a way, I also don’t think that I felt confident, in the very middle of this whole process, to make the kinds of generalizations that have been made since, now that there’s a certain distance from this period.
JD: The concepts themselves were also very much up in the air. People were moving, and new universities like Vincennes were opening, so the currents kept shifting at a very rapid rate.
FJ: Afterwards, one could see how these various concepts and movements were distinguishing themselves, becoming independent directions, but that wasn’t at all clear back then. The big deal was ’66 really, when books like the Écrits, Les Mots et les choses, and the early Derrida texts were being published. Tel quel was also very important at that time. It was certainly an interesting year, but the situation was changing every year in France. There was a lot that was happening in film, too. So it was more of a total scene with all of these different things coming up.
Later on, at Yale, when Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau were visiting and I was teaching a course on the sixties, I asked Chantale to come in and tell us her story. She said that she had spent most of the sixties in Latin America, but, in terms of France, when she returned during the summers, it was like a slideshow. Each summer you would find out that the preoccupation had shifted. Each summer there were new things everybody was talking about and, in a way, that created a lot of collective work.
JD: As a slideshow, it was collective work that was constantly veering off in autonomous directions, but this is something that was often overlooked in American renditions of the French structuralist scene.
FJ: I never thought of it as a philosophy, although there were those who did. I thought of Lévi-Strauss, for example, as coming out of a certain position that included Marxism, as he said himself, but I thought of structuralism and semiotics as methods. Above all, though, the methods that were emerging allowed for a more subtle, sophisticated, and complicated analysis of ideology, and it’s really ideological analysis that interested me throughout the seventies and eighties–and maybe the sixties as well–as these movements were coming into being and then dissolving.
Anti-Oedipus was also very important to me, but not early enough to figure in Prison House, and although I’d probably met Derrida by this point, it was only when I went back to Yale in the late seventies that I got to know him better. He was much more of a presence at Yale, to de Man and so forth. But, in a way, Derrida never interested me much. I was never a Derrida groupie. He did touch on a certain kind of politics. In Positions, for example, most of his interlocutors were Communists, Julia Kristeva and a group of Marxist-Leninist students. Like Lacan, in the sixties, he understood that most of the students were Marxists, that a lot of people on the left were becoming Maoist, but he had mixed feelings about that direction. There’s a certain political edge in his attacks on linguistic norms, in terms of his earlier work, but the Maoists were more direct in their cultural attack on authority, and I think that he understood their tactics to be politically ineffective. I did find a few of Derrida’s essays interesting, but he was developing independent problems, as was Deleuze. As these things proceed, they develop into movements organized around particular names, but, at that point, I was taking all of them on. Of all of the currents I was working with, I would’ve been most tempted to be a Lacanian fellow-traveler, but they were all important. Barthes as well. Foucault as well.
JD: Is it a conscious Lacanian turn, then, at the end of Prison House? In order to bring the synchronic and diachronic together, you argue that the analytic method should be conceived of as an operation in time that looks at an object in parentheses, and that this would reopen structure to the winds of history. This reminds me, in a way, of the analytic process, of the empty kernel that Lacan places between analyst and analysand, the space of jouissance that is always clouded by the objet a.
FJ: No, it definitely wasn’t a conscious decision. It was meant to be a call for a return to a more concrete and political form of analysis. All we had in those days was the Écrits, which was very scattered, historical, and obscure. Now that the seminars are available, things are very different, because the seminars are so much more accessible. A lot of us were busy reading the Écrits, but without much confidence in our orthodoxy. But at the same time, Lacan was changing, too. What was there in the Écrits was far from the final stage in Lacan.
In English, the seminars were done backwards, so Four Fundamental Concepts, seminar XI, came first. So we were sort of in the middle of things from the very beginning. If I look back on this, and if you read the earlier seminars of Jacques Lacan, I think that you can see that he set the pace of all this for a long time. A lot of Freud and Marx hadn’t been adequately translated into French, and he had some of these texts translated. Whatever he became interested in was suddenly, at least Paris-wide, followed by a lot of people.
JD: How did you feel about the other French intellectuals that were coming through La Jolla–how they were being taken up and followed? In his book on French Theory, for example, François Cusset suggests that, due to your steadfast allegiance to Marx, you were very hesitant about the work of the “French postmodernists” who were visiting San Diego. He even suggests that you warned your students against their methods (212). While “postmodernism” wasn’t an issue until much later, I wonder whether you were suspicious about the Nietzscheanism that was emerging in some of these people, and how you negotiated Nietzsche with Marx.
FJ: No, they weren’t “poststructuralists.” Nobody was a “poststructuralist” at that point. The term poststructuralist wasn’t even around at the time.
We knew that there were political differences when we invited these people but they were all “people of the left.” It was especially surprising with Jean-François Lyotard, because his anti-Communism didn’t really show up until the late-seventies. But we were always interested in what he was doing philosophically. As for Jean Baudrillard, I think it was always possible to learn something from his work, which had a lot to do with the various forms and phases of disillusionment concerning the French situation. We were also supposed to have Deleuze when he came to California in the mid-seventies, but, in the end, he backed out because when he and Guattari got to San Francisco they felt they had had enough.
That about the warnings, if you will permit me, was just BS: this is all propaganda that Kristeva has been spreading in her various slanderous and anti-Marxist campaigns (just look at her novels!). As for these so-called historians of structuralism, none of them know what they are talking about when it comes to the American intellectual scene in those days and certainly none of them ever talked to anyone in San Diego; it's much more convenient just to stay in New York City and fly home directly after your "research.” All of our French visitors were political and that was their interest for us; but the French situation was very complicated, and very clearly differentiated from our own by the existence of a still powerful French Communist Party to which many of them were hostile, even though they remained on the Left. Over here I suppose that if we had the choice most of us would have been much happier to express a sympathy with the Italian Communist Party; I think there were very few pro-Soviet sympathizers, but for me personally, as for some others, the great political event in those days was the Cuban revolution. But this is why Alain Badiou’s work has been so interesting to me, because it seems to be a renewal of these earlier trajectories and, in a way, it does put a lot of them into perspective. I think that his faithfulness to these older problems of the sixties and seventies allows one to see them in a different way.
But we continued following things throughout, during the years where Marxism was being shut down, the de-Marxification in the late seventies, the nouveaux philosophes, and so on. We kept current with the situation. When these people came, they held large seminars. The seminars were given in French, so there were a lot of students from the French, but there were students from Literature in general, as well. In the Literature program at San Diego, exceptionally English was included, but the centre of gravity for the program was Spanish, and especially Latin American, so there were a lot of Latin American students who were involved. It was quite a lively experience.
As for Nietzsche, he’s always ambiguous, but, in any case, the Nietzschean turns weren’t really a concern for me. What was more troublesome in Deleuze, for example, was the anarchism, but, it wasn’t really identified as anarchism until later on. Sure, Deleuze was responsible for a remarkable reinvention of Nietzsche, but, if you want, you can find Nietzscheanism in Sartre, in very un-Nietzschean forms. So the presence of Nietzsche in these people wasn’t at all surprising, or concerning. I think that the person who was the most suspicious to us, politically–but he never visited San Diego–was Foucault. This was mainly because of his frequent dismissals of Marxism and Marxists.
JD: When you say that the anarchism in Deleuze wasn’t identified until later, are you referring to secondary criticism or the second capitalism and schizophrenia book, where nomadism and the war machine are opposed to the state as an apparatus of capture? It seems to me that while it came a bit late, in 1980, Mille plateaux is a book that is in one sense grappling with, and in another performing, a kind of guerilla warfare, or focalism that people like Che Guevara, Régis Debray, the Weather Underground, George Jackson, and so on, were developing out of the Marxist-Leninist current that was taking shape in the global movements of the late sixties. While these movements were infiltrated and quashed in ways that remain to be fully revealed and properly understood today, Mille plateaux is a profoundly imaginative work, and with all of its smooth space and rhizomatic connections, its imagination is also very utopic. What is it about anarchism that makes it, in these particular instances, for you, an unacceptable development out of the Marxist tradition?
FJ: I am not necessarily talking about anarchism as a political movement, which is certainly an honorable enough left political choice. But I do think that the over emphasis of left-oriented thinkers on the political, on state power and power in general, has involved a neglect of economics which in my opinion was disastrous, so people like Foucault were very much a cause of that deviation for left intellectuals. I continue to hold that against his work; about Deleuze I would be less concerned to make this critique, too much is otherwise going on, and the celebration of the nomads is for me much more interesting than the rather ritualistic attacks on the state.
JD: You also mention Foucault’s position with respect to Marxism–was that not a common attitude that had more to do with the French Communist Party (PCF) as opposed to an indictment of Marxism itself?
FJ: That’s true. And Foucault’s work isn’t incompatible with Marxism. But I also never believed in a lot of Foucault’s scholarship. I thought that a lot of it was made up. Les mots et les choses is one book of his that I still read and teach, not because I agree with it, but, in its own way, it is compatible with Marxism. Marx isn’t so much undeveloped as excluded in Foucault.
JD: Did the lively seminar discussions at La Jolla extend beyond the university? I read somewhere that you were involved in the anti-war movement in the sixties. How did you negotiate the relationship between the theories you were reading and writing, and your own political practices?
FJ: I went to demonstrations like everyone else in those days. San Diego was a little quieter, but we had all of the military bases, so it was also a little bit more dangerous. I would say that I had mixed feelings in the sense that, while I felt that the general anti-war movement was very important, it wasn’t Marxist, it wasn’t revolutionary. Looking back, I think that the ideas did pry at some of the interesting features of capitalism, but, essentially, the emphasis on psychological causes of war, on aggressivity, on authoritarianism, and so on, revolved around a politics that was more psychological than economic.
There were other more radical movements, like the Black Panthers, that some of us felt somewhat closer to, not practically but theoretically. And we were much closer to the border, so there was a whole border movement, a Chicano movement, in San Diego. Some of that was a lot more radical, and interesting, than the white anti-war movement.
JD: I want to press the question about the relationship between theory and practice a little bit further. In some of your more recent work, [Archaeologies of the Future (2006)] for example, you talk about the necessity of imagining utopic spaces before being able to put them into practice, and that the utopian imagination is at its best in the midst of political calm. In The German Ideology, Marx states that “philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.” While I wouldn’t say that your hypotheses about utopia misses this point, the approach that you’re suggesting is quite different from the approaches of others, like certain of the French philosophers in 1968 for example.
FJ: Well, yes, but what you have to remember is that it’s an American situation that’s quite unlike the situation in Paris, where you can do things centrally, and a lot of people can come together and have demonstrations, and so on. San Diego, or even Los Angeles, isn’t suitable to this kind of approach. In the United States, things have to happen everywhere, in a decentralized federal system, and that makes for a real difference in what one can do.
The other significant thing was that we were thinking in terms of literary criticism and of culture generally, the ideological analysis of literature and culture. The point was to locate the ideological oppositions within texts. So, rather than experiencing de-Marxification and a crisis in the Socialist system, it was a crisis of literature itself that we were experiencing, the gradual passing of Literature into Cultural Studies. Ideological analysis is useful here too, but it has to take another form. When the free market becomes the object, the necessity for ideological analysis wanes, because it’s so obvious. Because the market admits to its methods, you don’t need demystification anymore. Maybe today the Left needs ideological analysis and demystification more than the right-wing doxa which have become the “common sense” of consumer society and free-market economics.
I also don’t think that the point about Utopia is that we have to wait for an idea to emerge from a calm, it’s that we have to think of utopia as a manner of breaking up the status quo in such a way that political action becomes possible again. It’s not that you have to think of the utopia and then act towards it, but that the equilibrium of the status quo has to be broken up first.
But the more recent work on utopia is also written in a very different situation, because in the late sixties and early seventies we were still involved in wars of national liberation. There was Vietnam, Cuba, China, and so forth. In the eighties, nothing was happening, and I would say that the first big political movement–the one that makes it possible to rethink some of these things–was Seattle (1999) and anti-globalization. At this point, a whole new context was emerging, and that’s really the context that we’re in today. That’s where the utopian project becomes important.
Utopia is a historical possibility that isn’t always possible, and it might very well take a form of action rather than just interpretation. On the other hand, I think the destructions of globalization have allowed people to understand how the system functions. I think there are situations in which Marx’s phrase is maybe a little too strong, where interpreting the world really is a part of changing it, because it educates people as to what’s actually happening around them.