Just consider some of these quotes from the opening of "On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act":
It (the text in question) conceives of the political perspective (re: Marxist perspective)...as the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation (181).
Our presupposition (for which no argument is made I might add) will be that only a genuine philosophy of history (re: Marxism again) is capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day. . . .(182)
To imagine that...there already exists a realm of freedom (or by implication anything else that contradicts Marxism)...is only to strengthen the grip of Necessity over all such blind zones in which the individual subject seeks refuge, in pursuit of a purely individual, a merely psychological, project of salvation (183).
Perhaps I am way off base, but this sounds to me like the infamous opiate of the masses. Something to be "presupposed" as "absolute" and the "only" means of interpreting anything not written yesterday. Something that then is the only viable portal through which we can access history because any other point of entry requires a reconstitution of that history that is perverted by our own modern perspective and even our own language (181-182), a disease of interpretive fallacy to which the enlightened, "genuine" few (re: Marxists) are apparently conveniently immune (although we must "presuppose" this immunity as no explanation for it is given), and then, since the ideal is to be rejected in favor of the material (we must be rational after all, none of that icky faith stuff) (Barry 150), the material can only be interpreted through history, and "only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past" well we should all just shut up and fall in line with this "absolute horizon" for a philosophy of life!
PPPPhhhhheeeeewwwwww. I accept that a Marxist perspective has some healthy critiques to make of a system based entirely on the idea that our individual greed can be harnessed for the good of all. I shudder at the idea of our economic system running freely without outside critique, as that is a sure fire recipe for disaster in any human system. But Jameson's broad, sweeping, take it on faith claims for Marxism as he opens this piece just don't pass the smell test. He's asking too much with no argument, no justification to back it up. I realize that he's simply establishing the ground work so that the rest of the text will make sense (at least I assume that must be what he's doing or it's far worse than I supposed), but even so, to presuppose that the view of the author is the only correct one...Welcome to the church of materialism/marxism.
I am supposed to believe, with all we know about the nature of text and the act of reading, that Marxism is free from the interpretive barriers to the past that everyone else encounters. That their pink glasses, donned before reading the past, doesn't color the light by which they see it? That they alone are not constructing (okay, reconstructing) the texts as they read them? I had a hard time even getting past this opening position statement.
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