In Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, he develops an “allegorical” approach to Marxist criticism, according to which literary works are “coded” representations of class struggle. Jameson understands literary works as “symbolic acts” that respond to social antagonisms by resolving them in an idealized narrative form. The task of the critic, on this account, is to deconstruct the work’s aesthetic façade, to disclose its hidden class standpoint, and to “renarrate” the text in terms of the suppressed historical conflict. This paper will deal with Jameson’s work to construct a theory about art more generally. The paper contends that Jameson’s allegorical approach presupposes a fundamentally representational conception of narrative—despite its powerful suggestion that artistic and literary works are symbolic acts. Drawing on the account of a “bio-aesthetics,” I develop in my recent book, True Materialism, I will show that Jameson’s provocative idea of the symbolic act fails to live up to its own promise: instead of grasping artistic and literary works as
coded representations of class struggle, Marxist criticism must understand narrative not primarily as representation but as an essential dimension of the self-reproduction of animals like us. On this account, literature, and art more generally, is not just a symbolic act but the activity of form through which social life reproduces itself under capitalist conditions.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History, Department of GNS+, and The Department of Art History. Dr. Jensen Suther is part of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.