Total Unconscious: Jameson, Conrad, and James

Aaron Jaffe, University of Louisville

This essay compares Fredric Jameson’s ideas about Henry James with his ideas about

Joseph Conrad. For Jameson, James and Conrad occupy minimally--but significantly--

different orbits. In a sense, Jameson’s James is the last realist, whereas his Conrad is the

first modernist. The distinction doesn’t so much depend on their respective techniques for

representing subjectivity as on their differing presentation of social-narrative space and

its communicative implications. Notwithstanding Jameson’s strong association with

postmodernism, his interests over the last two decades have increasingly turned to

modernism. His greater project has always hung on an explanatory scaffolding in which

modernism plays a decisive role as the middle, mediating term: realism-modernism-

postmodernism. The scaffolding depends on a certain communication breakdown--an

unresolved synthesis--between the past, present, and future.

We might connect this construct to a kind of message in a bottle stuck in the vortex of

the wrecked century, recycling the same information, the blinking cursor at the end of the

line. The message might be unassuming but the form of its transmission matters. In 1913,

a young Berliner named Richard Platz went hiking on a path near Kiel. During his walk,

he placed a self-addressed postcard in a beer bottle, corked it, and threw it into the sea. A

hundred years later, some fishermen recovered the bottle from near the same spot.

Various experts and analysts examined the barnacle-encrusted relic, and, improbably,

located a descendant of the sender--Angela Erdmann, his granddaughter--with whom

they shared the news. A photograph was taken and this headline attached: “‘World’s

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oldest’ message in a bottle arrives home” (“World’s Oldest”). Of course, the headline

wasn’t true: homecoming isn't possible for the bottle, only an unintended side-trip before

delivery to the International Maritime Museum, where it occupies a dignified place in an

exhibit. In fact, Erdmann never met her grandfather, who died right after World War II,

just before her birth. The message on his card itself is inscrutable--indecipherable due to

the residual beer in the bottle. After a hundred years, the stamps, the addresses, and the

postage systems are also long defunct. What survives is only enough to complete a circuit

of minimal messaging with the future. The message itself turns out to little more than an

improbable communicative act: if found, return to sender. That's it--the denkding with

wayward agencies cast adrift before the modern deluge, tossed by risky currents, time

and fortune, and the circuit--the hermeneutic circle--never gets closed. Platz never

renders his account--to borrow a line from Conrad.

The message in a bottle is a classic emblem for a kind of pessimistic, ex-anthropic

messaging system, future-thinking narrowcast to no one in particular. One might consider

it in the context of the recent proliferation of time capsules, Long Now Clocks, etched

plaques on deep space satellites, and poems and platitudes engineered into the DNA of

bacteria and extremophiles, all meant to communicate something after human extinction.1

Completing a circuit between sender and receiver after extinction seems to address gods

or aliens or the strategic re-appearance of the kind of ancient aliens who now provide a

mainstay of the History channel. In One Last Genius, Detlev Claussen notes that this kind

of idea belongs to the "prehistory" of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of

Enlightenment. He references a scene with the wayward émigrés on a beach in California

in 1940, joking that, with no coherent revolutionary audience in sight and the proletariat

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in shambles, critical theory itself resembles a message in the bottle (161). Horkheimer

further elaborates the idea in a letter from the period: "in view of everything that is

engulfing Europe and perhaps the whole world, our present work is of course essentially

destined to passed on through the night that is approaching: a message in a bottle," he

writes (161).2 In a collection of late aphorisms aptly titled “Messages in a Bottle,”

Adorno enlarges the idea:

Leavetaking is obsolete. . . . “O parting, fountain of all words,” but it has run dry, and

nothing comes out except bye, bye or ta-ta. Airmail and courier delivery substitute

logistical problems for the anxious wait for the letter, even where the absent partner has

not jettisoned anything not palpably to hand as ballast. Airline directors can hold jubilee

speeches on how much uncertainty and sorrow people are thereby spared. But the

liquidation of parting is a matter of life and death to the traditional notion of humanity ...

[T]o insist on parting’s inner possibility in face of its pragmatic impossibility would be a

lie, for the inward does not unfold within itself but only in relation to the objective, and to

make “inward” a collapsed outwardness does violence to the inward itself, which is left

to sustain itself as if on its own flame. (36)

Adorno’s point is about the failures of systematic totality and their implications for

inward and outward communicative life. Leavetaking and homecoming are broken, the

“inner and outer” are less “distinguishable by probing,” facing reality is measurable only

by things going away (big things becoming smaller) or coming closer (small things

becoming bigger) (39). In this framework, dropping a line from a sender to a receiver--

even if the message never arrives or just cycles on endless repeat--is seeing three-

dimensional logic in two-dimensional form.

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In The Political Unconscious, Jameson thinks a lot about different kinds of lines.

Mostly, the lines take the form of the horizon--the line that limits--adapting the legacies

of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. For Gadamer, as Jameson discloses in a long footnote,

horizons delimit what is knowable and what might be knowable (75). Taken another way,

the horizon is a limit on information. A circle turned on its edge is a line, a plot-form. In

communicative terms, then, the horizon designates a broken circuit for the observer. Two

lines, in effect: the horizontal line across the visual field that designates a conduit of

information and various perpendiculars that indicate distance and movement, things

going away or coming closer (which, in a sense, lends pathos to the hermeneutic push

and pull of close and distant reading). Lord Jim is Jameson’s locus classicus--not least

because the actual horizon organizes Jim’s work:

His station was in the fore-top, and often from there he looked down, with the contempt

of a man destined to shine in the midst of dangers, at the peaceful multitude of roofs cut

in two by the brown tide of the stream, while scattered on the outskirts of the surrounding

plain the factory chimneys rose perpendicular against a grimy sky, each slender like a

pencil, and belching out smoke like a volcano. He could see the big ships departing, the

broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little boats floating far below his feet,

with the hazy splendour of the sea in the distance, and the hope of a stirring life in the

world of adventure. (Conrad, Lord Jim 47)

As Jameson notes, the station equips Jim with mobile sightlines. His “ability in the

abstract,” his small talents for trigonometry and so on, amplified by his imperialist

reading materials, provide a certain spatial orientation (on a ship, seeing the land from

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sea) that marks critical orientations in literary form. Smokestacks, coaling stations;

stations of communication, switching stations; this is Conrad’s literary platform.

Horizons per se are not the only lines of interest to Jameson. They index other critical

limits experienced as form, other kinds of horizons that provide infrastructure suitable for

literary critical method. Most significant, there are the metaphorics of liminality

repurposed from psychoanalysis, the imaginary line separating latent and manifest

content, conscious and unconscious--for any given subject: what’s available in the

contents and what’s discoverable out of form. “Ideology is an amphibious formation,” by

which Jameson means, I think, it occupies surfaces and probes an assortment of depths

(Jameson, Political Unconscious 87). The relation between fields of perception, the

discovery of perspectivism, and the techniques of interiority has been discussed by many

commentators, including notably Jameson’s dissertation advisor Erich Auerbach.

Auerbach’s account of the “representation of reality” begins with the “procession of

phenomena [that take] place in the foreground . . . in a local and temporal present which

is absolute,” such as in the disclosure of a scar on the body of Odysseus, and extending

all the way to Virginia Woolf, whose narration mixes interiors and exteriors in complex

ways: “exterior events have actually lost their hegemony of the real world [and instead]

serve to release and interpret inner events” (7, 538).

Housekeeping the body’s affective present, then, remains within critical framework of

mimetic realism, and, for Jameson, Henry James is one of the essential exponents of the

approach. In this regard, Jameson calls James the fundamental “theoretician” of telling,

describing him at several points as the pinnacle of literary rendition of immersive

consciousness (see, for instance, SV 52; and AR 21). Jamesian realism positions a fixed

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address for charting personal identities and trajectories. The following passage from The

Ambassadors gets at the kind of home economics of the body’s present--which we might

call the realism of affect--that makes James a realist for Jameson:

They had stopped, in the afternoon sunshine--constantly pausing, in their stroll, for the

sharper sense of what they saw--and Strether rested on one of the high sides of the old

stony groove of the little rampart. He leaned back on this support with his face to the

tower of the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their station, the high red-brown

mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketed, retouched and restored, but

charming to his long-sealed eyes and with the first swallows of the year weaving their

flight all round it. Miss Gostrey lingered near him, full of an air, to which she more and

more justified her right, of understanding the effect of things. She quite concurred.

"You've indeed somebody." And she added: "I wish you WOULD let me show you

how!" (11)

Point of view is the engine here, of course; Jamesian perspectivism perfects the

development of a specialized narrative logic--governed, technologically speaking, by the

historical construction of techniques of the observer, as Jonathan Crary puts it. In this

scene at least, the station of the subject doesn’t organize a vanishing point at the limit of

earth and sky but lights on the sightseers, as if inside a pinhole camera. In effect, the

narrative station approximates the camera obscura, which as Friedrich Kittler writes,

encloses transmitted information (the perspectival lines of a represented sunlit exterior),

stores it inside (on a panel in a room and, later, in a portable box), and “combines for the

first time the optical transmission of information with the optical storage of information”

(63).

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Fusing this second horizon--the form for interiority--with other horizons that

conceptualize exteriority is a key part of Jameson’s hermeneutic project. Yet a third line

of Jameson’s derives from a particular adaptation of stratigraphy, “sedimented layers” of

deposited strata associated with geological time (Political Unconscious 9). Radicalizing

the line defining base from superstructure, the stratigraphic extremes--the deepest nickel-

iron core of the earth or the planetary whole viewed from space--provide geocentric limit

cases for all literary perspectivism, impossible standpoints at the scalar edges. For

Jameson, this limit means that “the political interpretation of literary texts . . . [is] the

absolute horizon of all reading and interpretation” (Political Unconscious 17). “The yarns

of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a

cracked nut,” Jameson says, invoking Conrad’s impossible narrator, the one James found

so frustrating (Political Unconscious 105). “Marxism is here conceived,” Jameson writes

in the opening pages of The Political Unconscious, “as that ‘untranscendable horizon’

that subsumes such apparently antagonistic or incommensurable critical operations,

assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself, and thus at once canceling

and preserving them” (10). Jameson’s epigraph from Durkheim about imagining totality

is relevant: "The very concept of totality is but the abstract form of the concept of

society: that whole which includes all things, that supreme class under which all other

classes must be subsumed" (8). He is well aware that this critical effort entails a

superhuman exercise, writing that it “takes place within a Homeric battlefield” (13).

These concentric circles subsume others, and the largest--the political--is perforce the

most encompassing. Within the shell of this gigantic cracked nut, as it were, we find “the

ethical, the psychoanalytic, the myth-critical, the semiotic, the structural, and the

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theological” (10). Further, this compiling--or fusion--of horizons not only circumscribes

the dominant literary-critical approaches of mid-twentieth century but also subsumes the

poststructuralist turn of the late twentieth century, deconstruction and all. The Political

Unconscious does an end run around the linguistic turn (the prison-house of language, as

Jameson famously formulates it) by running in circles, proposing that the political

(understood in Marxian terms as an emancipatory project) provides the largest

circumference of all, because it is the circle always drawn last (merging the necessity of

incompleteness and immanence and the impossibility of encircling the future). It is, like

Adorno’s message in a bottle, the message sent to no one in the future:

The assertion of a political unconscious proposes that we undertake [. . .] a final analysis

and explore the multiple paths that lead to the unmasking of cultural artifacts as socially

symbolic acts. It projects a rival hermeneutic to those already enumerated; but it does so,

as we shall see, not so much by repudiating their findings as by arguing its ultimate

philosophical and methodological priority over more specialized interpretive codes

whose insights are strategically limited as much by their own situational origins as by the

narrow or local ways in which they construe or construct their objects of study. (20)

If we diagram this framework horizontally--viewed on its edge, as it were--the circle isn’t

a feature of superstructure, but a totality rendered by scaling up the hermeneutic project.

The account thereby maintains interpretive contingency and anticipates the possibility of

interpretive closure without falling into weak pluralism. Here’s a visual aide supplied by

Jameson:

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What we’re looking at here is not a flattened version of the base/superstructure model--

nor a diagram of a Henry James sentence freighted with subordinate clauses. Rather the

figure illustrates a complex, recursively over-determined horizon, an exploded schematic

drawing of the invisible line connecting subjects and objects (tipping the planes of

abstraction on their edges, as it were). Or, perhaps, we might understand the diagram in

infrastructural terms as a diagram of mediation, a complex wire frayed on both ends.3

Before turning in earnest to the relation of James/Conrad, let’s examine one last form

of linearity from Jameson--the one with which this essay began--namely, the intertwined

vectors of historical lineage identified as realism-modernism-postmodernism. Jameson

writes that these schema are “meaningful only on the condition that we understand that

they draw on a linear fiction or diachronic construct solely for the purpose of constructing

a synchronic model of coexistence, nonsynchronous development, temporal overlay,

[and] simultaneous presence” (218). What’s crucial here is that any line of narrative

succession is constitutively incomplete, frayed at the ends as unsettled temporality,

dislocated topography, and aesthetic interruption. The importance of Conrad and James, I

argue, is that they abut the windless indoors and the great windy outdoors of Jamesonian

periodization. What’s more, if we stretch this line segment to include postmodernism,

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both touch that construct as well, as Jameson both implies and states explicitly in several

places (see, for instance, Political Unconscious 219).

We can put a finer point on this thesis by examining certain passages in The

Ambassadors (1903) and Heart of Darkness (1899) that add more granular detail in

symptomatic instances in which spatial-narrative form is given to communicative

extremity. To this end, I’ve selected cognate scenes for the one from Lord Jim (1900) that

Jameson famously interprets in The Political Unconscious that stations Jim on the fore-

top. Both novels are about failed ambassadors on furtive transcontinental errands, and, as

Michael Levenson has observed, follow similar outlines or platforms: “A man leaves his

native country to travel to another, where he hopes to retrieve an unaccountably estranged

member of his community” (2).4 Together, they tell a story of the communication

breakdown at the heart of modernity. Both novels concern errands to retrieve someone

and deploy embassies and ambassadors with injunctions to go abroad and bring back

news. In both novels, telematics repeatedly fails, storage and archiving don’t work,

homecoming and leavetaking--in the sense Adorno suggestively develops--prove

defective.

As I mentioned above, it's Conrad not James who occupies modernist pride of place in

Jameson's account, the station of meditational shift: "Nothing is more alien to the

windless closure of high naturalism than Joseph Conrad," Jameson writes (Political

Unconscious 206). The literary emergence of modernism--"the emergence of a media

society," as Jameson puts it--depends on unresolved synthesis, exemplified by the

unresolved inquest about the Patma in Lord Jim, or perhaps even more paradigmatically

via Marlow’s fitful debriefing that frames Heart of Darkness. From the windy station on

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the fore-top, exposed to the outdoors, the sight lines provide an avant-garde view. They

follow to the sea, which as Jameson writes, discloses “both a strategy of containment and

a place of real business,” bringing into view all kinds of distant terrain and strata, fusing

horizons over the “universal factory” of imperial capitalism, outwards to “scattered

beachheads and outposts,” to coaling stations and to assorted depots for information and

commodities (Political Unconscious 209). The station is a medium of interconnection,

resonating this work-place and its “dreary prose” with the light reading materials of Jim’s

youth and his fantasies of adventure. It supplies the impetus for modernism, the

“machinery for transforming . . . realities into impressions,” likened by Jameson to

“elaborate hermeneutic geiger counters” for detecting the invisible political unconscious

and radioactive ideologies of form (Political Unconscious 210, 211).

A similar effect is also pronounced at the beginning of Heart of Darkness:

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable

waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in

the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand

still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze

rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above

Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding

motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth. (103)

Here, the sea becomes the river, and, like Jim, Marlow occupies a station that looks out

over its strategies of containment and places of business. He sits separately, the

technician, equipped with vast horizon-fusing communicative machinery:

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Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha.

Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director, suddenly.

I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil

waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky-

-seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. (186)

Interruptions--match strikes beneath Marlow’s lean, administrative face--periodically

remind us that the magic lantern show depends on infrastructure, hidden wires entwined

with the “task [of] the making of a report, for . . . future guidance,” labor discharged by

Marlow, Kurtz and Conrad. Literary form now encompasses miscellaneous file systems

for containing whirlwinds of documents, correspondence, reporting, combined with an

account of the mission for rescuing “Kurtz” as a word, a glimpse, a reputation, a close-

up, and finally something about connecting a failed “relation” between “a dream” and a

“dream-sensation” (Heart of Darkness 129, 145). As Jameson points out about Lord Jim,

Conrad's critical relation to the great modernist outdoors is not only that his position

remains unstable after a century worth of commentary but also that the status of popular

materials in his work--from relics of imperial gothic to snatches of the genres of

bureaucratic administration--ceaselessly invites readerly administration (222).

Middlemen equipped with calipers and careful minute-taking are everywhere, not least

inside the imperial metropolis. The doctor who measures Marlow’s skull ominously

remarks that the follow-on reports get seldom filed: “the changes take place inside, you

know.”

It’s ironic--but also telling--to hear these words pronounced in Conrad, because, for

Jameson, the message taking place within more definitively characterizes James. Further,

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for Jameson, this is the paradigmatic form that Jamesian realism takes. Henry James

signals the last realist, or more to the point, the limit case for a confining spatial realism,

understood as the expression of inward, prematurely foreclosed social network. Realism,

Jameson writes in Antimonies of Realism, is a “uniquely modern form” but “not

necessarily a ‘modernist’ one” (3). Jamesian realism captures “new kinds of subjective

experience,” which Jameson likens to a “life sore,” “something given to you uniquely to

bear and to suffer” (4, 21). As such, James designates the “fundamental theoretician” of

narration as recitation in contrast to Conrad’s rendering of accounts (21). In James, this

machinery is immersive--the body immersed in the affective now: “The exhibition was

doubtless as yet not brilliant, but Strether himself, even by that time much enlisted and

immersed, had determined, on the part of the two ladies, a temperate approval and in fact,

as he now recollected, a certain austere enthusiasm” (AB 65). Jim stares over the

multitude (“the babel of two hundred voices”) and the smokestacks; Marlow envisions

the vast waterways of commerce stretching out from the Thames estuary (“the tranquil

waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth”); Strether immerses himself among

the tourist-sights of the metropolitan center, wagering on a “chance of being seen in time

from the balcony” (69). As the observer observing being observed--the placement par

excellence of bourgeois mise-en-abyme--Strether doesn’t so much make appointments as

simply linger with the expectation that somebody might fortuitously show up on the

continuous balcony and spot his body engrossed in an act of waiting.

Strether’s painstakingly administered fantasy of himself as “the elderly watcher”

hinges on the limiting possibility of being seen sympathetically from somewhere above:

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The balcony, the distinguished front, testified suddenly, for Strether's fancy, to something

that was up and up; they placed the whole case materially, and as by an admirable image,

on a level that he found himself at the end of another moment rejoicing to think he might

reach. (69)

Though set outside, the scene presents static interiority, echoing Jameson’s

claustrophobic critical realism that operates without mediation as “imprisonment in the

windless closure of formalisms” (42). However relationally, the levels appear carefully

matched and fully immersive to Strether:

the quality produced by measure and balance, the fine relation of part to part and space to

space, was probably--aided by the presence of ornament as positive as it was discreet, and

by the complexion of the stone, a cold fair grey, warmed and polished a little by life--

neither more nor less than a case of distinction, such a case as he could only feel

unexpectedly as a sort of delivered challenge? (68)

In terms of positioning, the narration immediately shifts from the aesthetic effect of a

particular miniaturized place--contained in a “fine relation of part to part and space to

space”--to the spatial meaning of the continent as a whole. From Strether’s point-of-view,

Europe designates, in effect, the platform cantilevered as a “windless closure,” the very

antithesis of Conrad (according to Jameson): “Europe was best described, to his mind, as

an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable

knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of

relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs” (55). In this case we see something

of what Jameson means when he writes that James epitomizes realism that centers on

“the fully constituted or centered bourgeois subject or monadic ego” (154). This

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vanishing point falls on the subject’s desire, centered in the field of vision of another,

more youthful, “future” version of himself--an unventilated, realist project that encloses

“the ‘superstructures’ of psychological lived experience and the ‘infrastructures’ of

juridical process” (154). With superstructures and infrastructures tracing the same circuit,

their operations in high realism, Jameson writes, “constitute quasi-materialist

transmission points which produce and institutionalize at the same time as they

themselves replicate and reproduce purely infrastructural requirements” (154).

That transmission points appear fixed and centered is noteworthy, and the circuits of

communication--the quasi-materialist transmission infrastructure--presuppose blockages

elsewhere. Strether’s charge is to act as a transmission point for news he

characteristically fails to transmit very much. This failure is thrown into sharp relief--

produced, institutionalized, replicated, and reproduced, to adopt Jameson’s idiom--when

he finally receives the belated backlog of letters from Woollett, Massachusetts:

This morning there WERE letters--letters which had reached London, apparently all

together, the day of Strether's journey, and had taken their time to follow him; so that,

after a controlled impulse to go into them in the reception-room of the bank, which,

reminding him of the post-office at Woollett, affected him as the abutment of some

transatlantic bridge, he slipped them into the pocket of his loose grey overcoat with a

sense of the felicity of carrying them off. [. . .] Europe was best described, to his mind, as

an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable

knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of

relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs. Strether, on his side, set himself to

walk again--he had his relief in his pocket; and indeed, much as he had desired his

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budget, the growth of restlessness might have been marked in him from the moment he

had assured himself of the superscription of most of the missives it contained. This

restlessness became therefore his temporary law; he knew he should recognise as soon as

see it the best place of all for settling down with his chief correspondent. He had for the

next hour an accidental air of looking for it in the windows of shops; he came down the

Rue de la Paix in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries and the river, indulged more

than once--as if on finding himself determined--in a sudden pause before the book-stalls

of the opposite quay. (54)

Communications eventually dam up in the empire of things. Surrounded by letters,

correspondence comes to a halt. Print culture doesn’t communicate (enough). Strether,

remember, wants to insulate himself from the Newsomes’ business, and his experience of

Europe wedges him between a clot of unread and obsolete news, on one Parisian bank,

and overfull bookstalls, on the other, as if crammed in a quiet, sound-proofed chamber.

The Jamesian machinery malfunctions--or, functions differently from Conrad’s.

Impressions become realities, and this passage emphasizes the insulating qualities of the

concrete abutments rather than the idealized communicative mobility promised by

imaginary transcontinental bridges.

If Strether/Chad occupies some static position near the tollbooth on a transatlantic

bridge, what’s the toll and who pays it? If Marlow/Jim index stations along the frayed

pathways of transoceanic cables, what frays them (Political Unconscious 219)? Messages

don’t arrive; the balcony and the fore-top may be only minimally opposed, after all. One

station may be older or newer; another position may organize a whole sedentary,

sedimentary ideology. A “containment strategy of a late nineteenth century bourgeoisie

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suffering from the aftereffects of reification” heralds new platforms, new arrangements

about consciousness and psychology, down the line (Political Unconscious 221). What

Jameson registers about James may also be true for Conrad: that the machinery has

significance after it pushes an earnest, documentary aesthetic of affect through the

dilemmas of high capitalism (222). The Ambassadors gives up the splendidly staged

encounter with Chad in the theatre. For all Conrad’s anticipation of filmic dollies

“leading to the uttermost ends of the earth,” the platform leaves Kurtz behind. In both

cases, minimal messaging means freeing the present from the hermeneutic burden of

newness and opening up a future for new news.

NOTES

                                                                                                               1On time capsules, see Jarvis’s Time Capsules: A

Cultural History.

2Adorno and Horkheimer are still talking about the

metaphor in an exchange from 1956 called “Towards a New

Manifesto?” In the discussion, Horkheimer proposes the

stockroom as better analogy for critical theory, a

survivalist reserve for the reconstruction after the

catastrophe. Adorno disagrees, saying that constructs are

needed that formalize the ruined status of communication:

“Theory is already practice. And practice presupposes

theory. Today, everything is supposed to be practice and at

the same time, there is no concept of practice. We do not

live in a revolutionary situation, and actually things are

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         worse than ever. The horror is that for the first time we

live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better

one.”

3Complex is a word Jameson uses often in connection to

method. Its etymology denotes both twisting together and

encircling or encompassing, multiple parts entwined into a

difficult to separate whole, suggestively raising the

problem of asymmetry, in which smaller or larger symmetries

may or may not be apparent at different scales.

4In his treatment of the novels, Levenson draws out an

analogy between “habits of leisure” and “methods of

colonialism” and argues that they enact the abandonment of

individuality.

WORKS BY HENRY JAMES

AB--The Ambassadors. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

WORKS BY FREDRIC JAMESON

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Osborne, Louise. “101-year-old Bottle Message: Baltic Find

Reveals My Roots, says Granddaughter.” Guardian 8 Apr.

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“'World's Oldest' Message in a Bottle Arrives Home.” Loca 8

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