Chapter 4

The Logic of Totalization

Jameson's priodization of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism

represents it in the light of history and this historicization is undertaken from the

perspective of the totalizing vision of Marxism which constitutes "the enabling conditions

of a possibility of a theoretics, conceptualizations of culture which lay bare its social

function, its meaning in history" (Gross 1989: 98). It has been mentioned above that this

totalization is not a homogenization of the various pluralities but a dialectical

accommodation of the heterogeneous elements of postmodernism and a laying bare of the

deeper dialectical interrelationship between them. A coinage of Sartre, the term

'?otalization," Jmeson says, means "to envelope and find a least common denominator

for the twin hwnan activities of perception and action." The concept of totalization i s

"designed in part to stress the unification inherent in human action" and hence it can be

specified as "an equivalent for 'praxis' itself." It is "the unification of a construct, the

interrelating of a new idea to the old ones, the active securing of a new perception . . . its

conversion into a new form." In a Sartrean sense totalizing is "that process whereby,

actively impelled by the project, an agent negates the specific object or item and

reincorporates it into the larger project-in-course" (1 99 1 a: 332-33). In other words, the

operation of totalizing is the "process of summing up from a perspective of making

connections, of existential negation and reincorporation, and of engaging in praxis"

(Gross 1989: 118).

Jameson wants that totalization be sharply distinguished from" "totality" with

which i t is often "indistinctly confounded." The concept of totality is the "apparent

ideological cognate" of the concept of totalization and it is "one philosophical form of the

notion of a 'mode of production"' (199Ia: 334, 333). 'To Jameson totality is "the social

whole in which 'everything depends on everything else"' (1971 a: 188). Steven Best

argues that there are "acceptable and unacceptable uses of the concept" of totality and it is

without discriminating between the two that poststructuralists attack todizing thought.

He says that totality suggests concretely existing structures and defines it a? a "system"

comprising "parts that are constituted by the whole system to which they belong and

which interrelate with that system." What this definition of totality suggests i s that in a

social formation things are "relational and systemic" in character, and that there exists "a

method whereby these relatima1 entities can be theorized and grasped." Distinguishing

between the acceptable and unacceptable versions of totalizing, Best says that the former

is a "contextualizing act which situates seemingly isolated phenomena within their larger

relational context and draws connections (or mediations) between the different aspects of

a whole." The latter, on the other hand, is a reductive process which "forces all particulars

within a single theoretical perspective at the expense of 'textual' difference and

complexity." Jameson' s periodi~ation and analysis of postmodernism. we have seen,

belong to the former category which grasps "systemic relationships while respecting

diikrence, discontinuity, relative autonomy and uneven development" (Best 1 989: 343-

44). Susan Wells approves of this method of totalization and asserts that for Jarneson

totality is a strategic rather than a transcendent concept. It is the mark of a

systemic attempt to objectify the world and to establish the boundaries of a

system's coherence, simultaneously marking them as boundaries and

warning the reader to test the truth of the relations that hold within them.

(quoted in Burnham 1995: 100)

Jameson denies that the unifying involved in totalizing i s done "with an eye to

power and control." Neither does it try to establish "a baggdge of first principles" as

fundamental to a conceptually secure scholastic system, nor does it institute and

legitimate terror in the name of some utopia or ultimate truth. On the other hand, its

dialectical method "unmasks the privileging of a given type of content as 'reification'."

Because the dialectic is the ''unity of theory a d practice." it seeks to transform the world

into "a meaningful totality suck that 'totality' in the form of a philosophical system will

no longer be required." So, Jameson concludes, any repudiation of' the concept of

totali7ation has to be "most plausibly decoded as a systematic repudiation of notions and

ideals of praxis as such, or of the collective project" ( 1 99 1 a: 332-34).

It will appear that there is a deep paradox in Jarneson's attempt to "grstsp"

postmodemism by " a periodizing or totalizing abstraction" which lies in "the seeming

contradiction between the attempt to unify a field" of various identities and "the logic of

the very impulses" of this field which is characterized as the "logic of difference or

differentiation" and acknowledged as "sheer heteronymy and the emergence of random

and unrelated subsystems of all kinds" (Jameson 1991 a: 342). Andrew Ross alleges that

the Mmist totalizing method can no longer "make sense of h e fragmented and various

ways in which people live and negotiate the everyday life of consumer capitalism" and i t

cannot account for "the complex ideological processes through which our various local,

insertions into that global economy are represented and reproduced (1989b: xv).

Accordingly, Jameson's efforts could be characterized as inconsistent with the spirit of

postmodernism itself. Steven Best says that Jameson's conceptual unification "preserve[s]

differences, dispersions, and discontinuities" at the same time that it provides "the general

context of determination common to every aspect of the whole" (1989: 347). Jameson

himself says that his periodizing hypothesis "ought'to be understood as an "attempt to

'muster,' 'dominate "' the postmodem, and "to 'muster ' history." It i s an effort to master

"the escape from the nightmare of history," to conquer "the otherwise seemingly blind

and natural 'laws' of socioeconomic fatality" ( 1 99 1 a: 342-3, emphasis added). Arguing

that the question of contradiction in his "unified theory of differentiation" rests on "a

confusion between levels of abstraction," Jameson reiterates that "a system that

constitutively produces differences remains a system." The concept of differentiation that

the ideology of pluralism projects is itself a "systematic one" that "turns the play of

differences into a new kind of identity on a more abstract level" (1991 a: 343). The dekdils

of this differentiation at the social level will be examined later.

The prodigious global expansion of capital during the third stage of its

development that Jameson has underlined following Ernest Mandel and Giovanni Arti ghi

has had its effects in the sociopolitical realms as well. This process which started by the

end of the nineteen sixties in Western Europe was extended to the Third World countries

by the early eighties and with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Socialist

Eastern Bloc countries, capitd and its logic seem to have left no more space to be

penetrated into. This has resulted in what Jarneson calls "an immense freeing or

unbinding of socid energies, a prodigious release of untheorized new forces" and in fresh

perspectives on political economy and political organizations including the very concepts

of national governments ( 1 988b: 210). The new world order is a much publicized

ideology in which the rhetoric of the freedom of the global market is high on the agenda.

Needless to say, the construction of this ideology of globalization is immensely aided by

the postmodem technology.

'Ihere is no doubt that the nexus between the media and the market plays a vital

role in propagating the idea of globalization. Such media rhetoric, writes Jameson,

not only reinforce[s] . . . international consumerist styles but even more

importantly Dlock[s] the formation of autonomous and alternate cultures

based on different values or principles. . . . This clearly enough makes

culture ... into a far more central political issue than it ever was in previous

moments of capi talism. (1 996a: 17- 18)

This stifling of the growth of alternate and autonomous cultures, it has to he understood,

is in direct contradiction to what the pluralistic ideology of postmodernism projects.

'I'he globalization of capital has rendered the older nation states ineffective. The

new world order has seen the end of national autonomy and sovereignty. Conceptions

such as national autonomy and the welfare state have become unpopular today and are

"energetically discredited by the media," says Jameson. For Third World countries like

India and Brazil, this seems to be "reassuring," for they appear to be competing to be

"integrated into the world market" the consequences of (not) doing which are

"perpetuated by world information circuits and exported entertainment" (1 996a: 1 7). Ilis

rhetoric of the market is part of the "corporate speech" which was discussed in chapter

two. Jameson's idea can be explained in the following way. With the integration of

countries into the global market the capitalist forces are allowed free reins to seduce and

determine the needs, tastes, desires and thereby the very life of a people. Thus the citizens

of a country are transformed into nothing more than consumers of a globa I market and the

nation-state, even as an idea, loses its very relevance. The autonomy and sovereignty of

the nation-state and all ideas associated with the concept of a welfare state which were

held high in the modem period have now become redundant. Consequently, political and

ideological struggles have been displaced into the space of the market which, needless to

say, is controlled by capitalist forces.

Zygrnunt Rauman has drawn attention to how the growing penetration of the life-

world by capital has emancipated power from democratic institutions. T%e "emancipation

of state from democratic control," "the emancipation of the political state Erom public

control," results in the domination and colonization of civil society as 'Yhe sphere of

reproduction of consumers," that is to say, men and women whose interests in autonomy

are permanently redirected to fit the needs of the market" (1987: 92). Samir Amin's

observations on the process of globalization also justify Jamesan's views on the nation-

state being made an obsolete concept. He says that it is the political strategy underlying

globatization to disarm. weaken and disintegrate nation-states in order to strengthen the

market forces. It is as part of this stmtegy that these forces encourage all kinds of

religious, sub-national, ethnic and other forms of struggles for "identity" so as to sabotage

established societal forms led by strong governments. It is important to remember that the

Third World countries had succeeded in mustering the support oC the various religious,

ethnic, linguistic and other such minorities in their anti-colonial liberation movements and

in the early stages of their national reconstruction. The very legitimacy of the newly

independent nation-states depended on their ability in integrating these various groups

into the body of the nation and reaffirming their participation in the process of rebuilding

the nation. They were successful, too, in these efforts to a great extent. But with the

opening of the frontiers of the states to the vagaries of the market and the weakening of

the governments, forces of disintegration set in leaving the question of the very concept of

a nation-state open to suspicion (Amin 1998).

'The restructuration of capitalism bas had its effects in the social realm as well. It

is well known that modernity was a long period of individualism and social atomization

and, consequently, the autonomous artistic realm of modernism has been considered the

creation of individual geniuses, the great auteurs and their private inimitable styles. We

have any number of examples for the variety of solitary figures as existential heroes and

anti-heroes, artists, freaks and eccentrics who are victims of the experience of anomie,

rebels whose liberal imagination impels them to adopt seemingly 'revolutionary'

positions against existing social system, But with the much celebrated 'death of the

subject' the postmodern society is witness to extraordinary modifications of social reality.

The process of these modifications is visible as "an objective historical tendency"

affecting all sections of society in the form of the "organization and collectivi~ation of

individuals" into new social movements (Jameson 1991a: 321). This process, Jameson

says, has been described as "the emergence of new 'subjects of history' of a non-class

type." He relates ''the emergence of these new 'identities'," "these new social and

political categories (the colonized, race, marginality, gender and the like) to something

like a crisis'' in the traditional social class ( 1 988b: 181). The "micropolitics" that

corresponds to the emergence of the "nnon-class political practices" of these new social

movements is "an extraordinarily historical" as we1 I as "a profoundly postmodern"

phenomenon, says Jameson (1 991 a: 3 18- 19).

This postmodern tendency towards collective organization "envelopes" all

sections of society alike and the "most systemic and abstract analysis" of it, writes

Jarneson, "assigns the ultimate systemic condition of possibility for all such group

emergence . . . to the dynamics of late capitalism itself' (1991a: 325). Jarneson argues

that "the global restructuration of production and the introduction of radicdy new

technologies" have thrown workers in traditional industrial workplaces out of work,

"displaced new kinds of industry to unexpected parts of the world, and recruited

workforces different from the traditional ones in a variety of features from gender to skill

and nationality" (1 99 1 a: 3 19). That there have been structural transformations and

displacement of the workforce and transplantation of industries to the newty decolonized

'Shird World countries are historical facts attention to which have been drawn by Eric

Hobsbawm and Hans-Georg Betz (Hobsbawm 1 992b: 302, Betz 1992).

Klaus Eder, in his essay "A New Social Movement?" ( 1 982) argues that these new

social movements referred to above contain neo-romantic and neo-populist forms

combining cultural and political tendencies and that pushing beyond modernity toward a

postindustrial order they emerged in response to the developments within capitalist

modernity ( 1 982: 10-16). Steven Rest and Douglas Kellner suggest that these groups

emerge from "highly complex and differentiated political context" and attempt to

"articulate and oppose the specific fonns of oppression affecting different groups and

individuals." The politics of gender, race, ethnicity, and other forms of marginalized

subject positions espoused by these groups "valorize their differences from other groups

and individuals." They have been included "within the rubric of 'postmodern politics"'

and have been "theorized under the banners of both the 'politics of difference7 and the

'politics of identity'." 'These new political groupings of "categories neglected in previous

modern politics," Best and Kellner say, attempt 90 mobilize a politics based on the

construction of political and cultural identities through political struggle and

commitment" (1 991 : 205).

While Jarneson accepts that there have been changes within the structure of the

traditional working class, he says that "it is premature to deplore the weakening of class

consciousness in our society today." He has no doubt that ours is a class society and

"class struggle continues at every instant." This class consciousness is "alive and well in

collective fantasy, and in the ongoing stories and images people tell themselves about

history, in their narrative anxieties about their hture and their past" (1982~: 77). He

refuses to believe that these small groups have emerged in a space left vacant by the

disappearance of the traditional working class. For, he asks: how can classes be expected

to disappear except in the "unique special case scenario of socialism"? ( I 991 a: 3 1 9). This

claim, Jameson argues, is put forward by the "self-congratulatory rhetoric" of capitalist

democracy and pluralism: "the system congratulating itself for producing ever more

greater quantities of structurally unemployable subjects7' ( 1 991 a: 320). That the number

of structurally unemployable subjects has been increasing and that the traditional working

class has been weakened ever since the shift in the structure of capitalism in the

postmodern times described in chapter one is corroborated by many writers (Hobsbawrn

1992b: 302-03, Harvey 1989: 150-56, Baurnan 1987: 83). But this does not mean that

class distinctions have disappeared and that groups and institutions rather than classes and

economic factors condition and determine cultural forces in society. Douglas Kellner has

drawn attention to recent studies which disclose that the dominant trend of social

development in late capitalism is a "class stratification" in which "class divisions and

inequalities are increasing rather than diminishing" ( 1 989b: 229).

How, then, is the emergence of the smdi groups to be accounted for? According

to .lameson, it is the "Utopian impulses" of the nineteen sixties that were responsible for

the wide range of L'micropolitical movements" (1 991 a: 160). Since the end of the sixties,

he writes, there has been a ''well-nigh universal feeling of powerlessness," a strong

"conviction as to the fundamental impossibility of any form of real systemic change in

our societies" and a sense of the "futility of all forms of action or praxis'' which accounts

for "the passionate adherence to" the various forms of small groups (1 996a: 18). Mostly

predicated on issues such as neighbourhood politics, racial, ethnic, gender, ecological and

other such issues with a single agenda, Jameson argues, these movements have "the

resurgent problematic of Nature in a variety of (often anticapitalist) forms," as a

*'common denominator," and they constitute "the repudiation of a traditional left party

politics and thereby, in their own way, as another 'end of ideology"' (1991a: 160). The

dynamics of the small groups also display a "seriality" in their politics whereby each

group "simultaneously imagines itself to be a minority oppressed by another group

(which feels the same way)" (1994a: 64). These individual microgroups, says Jameson,

"attempt to define themselves against the larger hegemonic structures by identifying what

is often imperfectly called a group or collective 'identity'," an identity that is based h l l y

"as much on solidarity as on alienation or oppression" and which feeds on "whatever 1

collective structures seem to resist the anomie of the modern industrial state and to offer

some negative and critical power" (1994a: 66-7). Jameson emphasizes the specificity of

each group's experience of domination and asserts that there is an ultimate commonality

in their experiences within late capitalism (1988e: 69-70). Underlining the molecular

nature of these social movements Stanley Aronowitz says that they are "communitztrian"

and "speak for their own local aspirations against the power of multinationals that control

their labour power and also against the national state" that is now no more than a mere

agent of capital (1988: 59-60). But Jameson does not think that all these groups do enjoy

"lahour power" as Aronowitz does. It is Aronowitz's conviction that in these new

movements "the union is the repository of the broad social vision" which is "linked to the

neighbourhoods, as well a? to the workplace. In short, it is a cultural as well as an

economic form" (1 988: 6 t ).

Jameson argues that these movements are related to "the institutional

collectivization of contemporary life." He explains that this is, in fact, the realization of

"one or Marx's fundamental prophesies, that within the 'integument' of individual

property relations (private ownership of the factory or enterprise) a whole new web of

collective production relations was coming into being incommensurable with its

antiquated shell. husk, or form" (1991a: 320). It is only to be expected that after a Jong

period of individualism and projection of individual heroes and the philosophy of

existentialism in a capacious social order there follows a period of a collectivization of

individuals. In support of his proposition that it is the dynamics of capitalism itself that is

ultimately responsible for the small groups Jarneson points out that in the decentered and

schizophrenic society of late capitalism, the "semi-autonomy" of the heterogeneous

level.^" in the ''structural totality'' that Althusser elaborated relaxes into "autonomy tout

court" and the different instances will have "no organic relationship to one another at all."

The consequence is the emergence of the idea that having no necessary relationship

whatsoever to others, every level has to develop strategies and struggles appropriate to

itself. "With this ultimate 'meltdown' of the Althusserian apparatus," writes Jameson,

"we are in the . . . world of microgroups and micropolitics." He is convinced that these

small groups constructed on single issues repudiate "old fashioned class and party politics

of a 'totalizing' kind" and their strategies and concerns "cut across . . . many classical

forms of 'public' or 'oficial' political action including the electoral kind" ( 1 988b: 192).

What is at stake in such microgroup politics are "misconceptions of 'totalization' and

reification of the theme of power and domination, concludes Jameson ( I 994a: 64).

Jameson uses the paradoxical slogan of "difference relates" to present his thesis that in

the ultimate instance all these levels are related somehow or other to the social totality.

"l'heorjes of difference," he says, emphasize "disjunction" and separate identity so much

that the differences fall apart into "a set of elements which entertain separations from one

another" (1991a: 31). The moment at which identity is made "the dominant or

fundamental category ," Jameson argues, is, in fact, "the moment of Difference" when it

becomes obvious that "'it is identity as difference that is identical with itself ." This

Hegelian notion tells us that a thing can be identified in "its innermost identity only by

showing what it is not" (1 998b: 80).

Ernesto I,aclau and Chantal Mouffe are two important post-Marxist theorists and

ideologues of the micropolitical movements whose observations on the postmodem

movements deserve attention. They challenge the central significance of the category of

class as the locus of political consciousness and argue that no society can be statically

explained. For them the focus has to be more on local political actors arid their differences

and diversity than on their common relationship to the means of production. A plurality of

collective actions is generated from this fluidity of identities. Hence, these social

movements have to be the primary focus for any serious analytical engagement with

historical and political agency in society. They argue that the structural transformations

within the capitalist mode of production leading to the emergence of postindustrial forms

of life. the associated decline of the working class, and the disappointments linked to the

failure of fbrmerly existing socialism are all responsible for the emergence of these

movements. They insist that the diverse range of social identities are purely relational, a

consequence of the "articulation within a hegemonic formation" and that they are not

subordinate to a priori class struggles and demands (1985: 84-7). With the emergence of

this plurality of sociopolitical movements ideas like the singularity or unity of history,

universal subject and society as an intelligible structure have been dissolved. The

contemporary social and political struggles cannot be analyzed with the help of the

traditional Mamian tools of class, history and society which are intelligible totalities

constituted around conceptually explicable laws. The postmodem condition demands a

new politics based upon the project of a radical democracy which will deconstruct the

classical Marxist categories, and the conception of subjectivity and classes ( 1 985: 2-4).

In T,aclau and Mouffe's formulation the field of social differences is not fixed on

the basis of the single constitutive principle of class but based on the unstable and

changing conditions in which contemporary political struggles and movements emerge

and develop. They emphasize the "open, non-sutured character of the social" and find a

link between the emergence of the new relatively fluid sociopolitical movements and the

associated predominance of a hegemonic form of politics ( 1 985: 1 38). The new sociai

movements and forms of social conflict are representations of new forms of political

subjectivity antagonistic to new relations of subordination and they are externions of

democratic revolution. Common to all these forms of movements is the constitution of a

social identity, which simultaneously introduces a division into the social space, a

division predicated on relations of equivalence through which political identity and

difference are formed. They express themselves more by affirming liberalism than in

terms of collective struggle, because they constitute forms of resistance to accelerating

processes of commodification, bureaucratization and homogenization (1 985: 1 64-5). The

weakening of the structural unity of the working class and the absence of a political

identity of the traditional working class in the postindustrial scenario make possible the

emergence of the "plurality of the social and the unsutured character of all political

identity" (1 985: 166).

1,aclau and Mouffe problematize the concept of a unified class subject suggesting

that it obscures the process of discursive constitution through which the plurality of

pol iticat subjectivities are constituted and impedes the development of a radical and plural

democracy. There is no privileged form of subjectivity nor any

privileged position from which a uniform continuity of effects will follow,

concluding with the transformation of society as a whole. All struggles

whether those of workers or other political subjects, have a partial

character, and can be articulated to very different discourses. . . . There is,

therefore, no subject . . . which is aksolutely radical and irrecuperable by

the dominant order and which constitutes an absolutely guaranteed point of

departure for a total transformation. (1985: 169)

The implication of statements such as these is that in the postmodern context of the

erosion of a politics based on class interests and class perceptions it is necessary to

radicalixe the conception of the social agent and of social antagonism and to

accommodate the plurality of social agents within an extended field of diverse social

conflicts.

Thoughts on the crisis in the Marxian paradigm have always been generated

whenever capitalism, Marxism's fundamental object of study, has seemed to undergo

structural changes, like the latest one engineered by the economic crisis of the 1970s and

the technological revolution. Laclau and MouiTe's proposals for a radical revision of

Marxism follow the lines of Eduard Bernstein's Presuppositions r$ Socialism und the

Tasks of Social Democracy that appeared in 1898, the year Ernest Mandel points out as

the beginning of the third stage of capitalism. All these post-Marxisms, Jameson says,

seem to suggest that "chssicai capitalism no longer exists and has given way to this or

that 'post-capitalism"' in which the features described by Marx and particularly ''the

dynamic of antagonistic social classes and the primacy of the economic" no longer exist

(1996a: 2 1). Jameson considers it a mistake to suppose that "the historically original

dynamics of capitalism have undergone a mutation or an evolutionary restructuration"

because the basic drives of capitalism to increase the tempo of technological change and

to generate maximum profit are still there in it along with their corresponding

consequences in the sociocultural realms (1 996a: 22). He points out that what l,enin,

Mandel and Giovannj Arrighi have tirelessly shown over the years is that during all the

periods of crises which capitalism has faced it has, as a system, rejuvenated itself by "a

convulsive enlargement" and "extension of its logic and its hegemony" over ever larger

geographical areas ( 1 996a: 24). Drawing attention to the contemporary global expansion

of capital and its decentrali7atjon on which the new post-Mamists predicate their

arguments for the irrelevance of Mamian paradigms Jameson says that though they tell us

something significant about changes in social life today conceptually it is only within the

structure of the new world system of capitalism that the "emergence of the new internal---

existential or empirical-social--- phenomena" can be understood ( 1 996a: 25-6).

As for the post-Marxist argument that the category of class i s inadequate,

outmoded and irrelevant, Jameson says that with the globalization of capital and the

internationalization of the process of production it is only natural to expect that the

process of a new global class formation is inevitable. Only, it is difficult to map this

ioaccessi ble reality ( 1 996a: 39). Jameson proposes "cognitive mapping" to do this, details

of which will be discussed in the next chapter. The "alleged incompatibility" between a

class politics and the priorities of the postmodem micropolitical movements "reflects" an

American perspective in which race and gender loom larger than class. From this

perspective class is treated as '?he badge" of just another group of individuals. Jameson

argues that class is a "universalizing" category and "a form of abstraction capable of

transcend; ng individuality and particularity" and hence different in conceptual status from

race and gender. Class is an "nntological" category and hence its "truth" lies in "the

operations to which i t gives rise." So, even in the absence of a coherent "philosuphy" of

class, Jameson writes, class analysis remains "valid and indispensable" (1996a: 40). He

adds that class consciousness is

as "internally conflicted" as categories like race and gender: class

consciousness turns first and foremost around subalternity, that is around

the experience of inferiority. This means that "the lower classes" carry

about within their heads unconscious cortvictions as to the superiority of

hegemonic or ruling-class expressions and values, which they equally

transgress and repudiate in ritualistic (and socially and politically

ineffective) ways. (1996a: 41)

Jameson concludes that "class investments operate according to a formal rather than a

content-oriented dynamic" and hence class is "both an ongoing social reality and an

active component of the social imaginary" which in late capitalism informs our "maps of

the world system." It absorbs and refracts gender and racial connotations and their

oppositions in such a way that once the focus shifts from "a world system" to " a regional"

one. the class map is "rearticulated in new ways." Thus, class can be seen as always being

"contingent and embodied, as always having to realize and specify itself by way of the

categories of gender and race" ( 1 996a: 4 1 -3).

Jarneson refers to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffc's argument that it is from

the passion for equality that these social movements spring. This argument, he says, i s

"less attentive to the tendency to differentiation and separatism, infinite fission and

'nominalism'" in microgroup politics (1991a: 3 19). Separatism, he says, is "the very

precondition" for any group unification and requires "mass cultural standardization" and

consumption for its sustenance (1 994a: 105). It needs to be underlined that the very logic

of capitalism is ultimately dependent on the equal right to consumption. The capitahst C

sysiem has a "fundamental interest in social equality to the degree to which it needs to

transform as many of its subjects or its citizens into identical consumers interchangeable

with everybody else" (1977a: 844). Thus, it is to be understood that late capitalism's deep

interest in the endless production and proliferation of all kinds of new groups i s with a

view to perpetuating and realizing its own market interests. It is in this context that the

concept of class becomes all the more important for political people interested in radical

social theory and in systemic changes.

Vincent L,eitch points out that Jameson displays "a mixed reaction" to this

proliferation of microgroups and argues that

[tlhe pluralistic postmodern idea of groups as the motor force of historical

change subverts master narratives about the proletariam subject of history

and the coming revolution. With the emergence of groups, the notion of a

"ruling class" departs, as does the idea of production. ( 1 992: 1 1 3-1 4)

Pluralism, lameson admits, is the ideology of groups. But the fact is that the concept of

"difference" an which this ideology rests is nothing more than "Iiberal tolerance." And, as

a social fact, isn't the tolerance of difference "the result of social homogenization and

standardization and the obliteration of genuine social difference"? Jameson asks. He

points out that "one's being condemned to be identified as a member of a group" is

entirely different from a voluntary choice of "the badge of a group membership because

its culture has become publicly valorized" (1 991 a: 341 ). It is this valorization which

makes many o f these groups hot media topics and "accredited sociological categor[iesjm

"always under scrutiny" and given as many different labels as possible by specialists and

experts. "Everyone today is, if not organized, then organizable," says Jameson (1991a: *

322). Thus, everyone in the postmodern times seems to represent several groups all at

once and "everything in our social reality is a badge of group membership and connotes a

specific hunch of people" (Sameson I991a: 347). This "retreat into ever smaller groups of

the faithful," says Zygmunt Bauman, is "sectarian" and its politics leads to demands for

"shortcuts" and sometimes to "terrorism" (1987: 82).

Ciroup representation is "anthropomorphic" and gives the impression that "the

social world [is] divided up and colonized down to the last segment by its collective

actors and the allegorical representatives," says Jameson. Because the framework of

groups i s Lbinslibution," they have a much better mobilizing force offering mch member of

the group "the gratification of psychic identity (from nationalism to neoethnicity)."

Aronowitz recognizes the oppositional potential of these rnargind groups and realizing

that capital can subvert the margins by making them fashionable he suggests that

marginality should not be valorized per se as a form of subversion (1 98 t : 1 96-7). But the

interest generated in them by the media has transformed them into images and thus allows

"the amnesia of their own bloody pasts, of persecution and untnuchability." These images

can now be "consumed" as commodities. Jameson says that the media have become "their

parliament and the space of their representation in the political fully as much as the

semiotic sense" (1991 a: 346-7). Though groups are so small that they a1 low for "libidinal

investments" of a "narrative kind." there are "representational paradoxes" that we find in

group narratives. Jameson articulates this paradox thus:

since the ideology of groups comes into being simultaneously with the

well known death of the subject (of which it is simply an alternate version)

. . . the consequences will be that these new collective characters and

representations that are groups cannot any longer, by definition, be

subjects. ( 1 99 1 a: 348)

Thus, Jameson concludes, these groups can never function as class and can never replace

it as a functional substitute because no group can ever have a systemic perspective .

C'lasses are too large and "more material, more impure and scandalously mixed."

They are determined by factors involving the production of material objects and the

"relations determined by that along with the forces of the respective machinery." They

emerge by "slow transformations in the mode of production" and seem "perpetually at

distance from themselves and have to work hard to be sure they really exist as such." The

class function is "mediated by the system as a u~hoie" and hence through class categories

we can see down "to the rocky bottom of the stream" (1991a: 346-8). Jameson

emphasizes "the difference in conceptual status" between the idea of social class and that

of micropolitical groups. He means that class is an "ontological" and a "universaiieing"

category, "a form of abstraction capable of transcending individuality and particularity"

in such a productive way that "the upshot of that transcendence is envisioned to be the

abolition of the category itself' (1996a: 40). 'This is something which the groups never

allow because of their minimal perspectives and that i s why Jameson says that they can

never be the substitute for class and the subject of history which Marx discovered in the

form of the proletariat. Jarneson argues that "in the pluralism of the co1lective groups. and

no matter how 'radical' the imrniseration or marginalization of the group in question, it

can no longer fill that structural role, for the simple reason that the structure has been

modified and the role suppressed" (1 99 1 a: 348). He suggests that, historically. this is only

to be expected because "the transitional nature of the new global economy has not yet

allowed its classes to form in any stable way, let alone acquire genuine class

consciousness so that the very lively social struggles of the current period are largely

dispersed and archaic" (1 991a: 348-9). Thus, it is Jarneson's contention that the "new

social movements and the newly emergent global proletariat both result from the

prodigious expansion of capitalism in its third (or 'multinational') stage; both are in that

sense 'postmodern"' ( 1 99 1 a: 3 1 9). Jarneson's preference for class politics that these

passages amply demonstrate is a genuinely political choice of a systemic perspective with

a view to achieving revolutionary change in the social formation.

Jameson has been blamed for being "virtually silent on a whole range of

formations such as feminism, ethnic studies, discourses of sexuality etc., and yet rnakring]

total and global claims" (Radhakrishnm 1989: 322). Vincent I,eitch complains that

Jameson has nothing to offer on feminism and pastcolonial theory and that his theory of

the mode of production "celebrates sameness aver difference" (1 992: 1 19). It is true that

Jameson does not offer any detailed treatment of feminism or the postcolonial theory. But

the social movements that he speaks of and some of which have been discussed in these

pages include feminism as well. Tbe observations he makes on these movements cannot

be ignored. He suggests that distinctive "moments of truth can be found in feminist

theorizing and in the group experiences of women, Blacks and Central European Jews.

And, to understand a group's "moment of truth" is to understand how their social

constraints make possible an otherwise unavailable social experience as well as to

translate such experience into "new possibilities of thought and knowledge" (1 988e: 70).

He acknowledges that "we have lemed many things from feminism" and that "much o f

the political force of feminism comes from its collective dimension, i ts status as the

culture and ideology of a genuine social group." But he observes that this force "ties

back" with "the force of the collective as such" and with "the political problems raised

today by the dynamics of microgroups or small group politics" (1982~: 90). During the

postmodem times, Jameson remarks, capital has menacingly penetrated the enclave of the

"nonpaid labour of the older interior or home or family" thereby "unbinding and

liberating that enormous new social force of women who immediately then pose an

uncomfortable new threat to the new social order" (1988b: 47). He also says that

"feminism has been virtually alone in attempting to envision the Utopian languages

spoken in societies in which gender domination and inequality would have ceased to

exist" (1991a: 107). These remarks prove to be unfounded the allegations of McGowan

that Jameson fails "to appreciate the potential of the new social movements" and that "his

sometimes less than subtle characterization of the working class, women and of the Third

World peoples are disappointing" (1991: 158). McGowan himself says that in

acknowledging "the political potential of the women's movement" fameson speaks of "a

more contradictory, more conflictual and less monolithic social result stemming from late

capitalism's invasion of the family" (1 991 : 156).

Observations like these are evidences enough to prove that Jameson acknowledges

the significance of feminism. But, i t i s true that he does not approve of the politics of a

single point agenda and minimal perspectives of such micropolitical movements. His

argument for not doing so is that the values of these movements are "preeminently

cooptable" because as ideals they are already "inscribed in the very ideology of capitalism

itself' and hence they are "part of the internal logic" of capitalism. He claims that the *r

capitalist system is "structurally unabte to realize such ideals even where it has an

economic interest in doing so" (1977a: 844). Sean Homer agrees with Jameson's

contention pointing out that "arguments for a politics of difference and pluralism are not

necessarily progressive and can serve the needs of capital rather than those of the

oppressed gmups themselves." He also adds that "it is the very plurality of groups that

miligates against any effective political action taking place at a systemic level" (1998:

f 79). 'This is why Jameson says that race and sex and other such categories are

"theoretically subordinate to the categories of social class" (1977a: 844). He prefers an

"older politics" based on class that seek '90 coordinate local and global stmggles"

endowed with an "allegorical value" of L4representing the overall struggle itself and

incarnating it in a here-and-now thereby transfigured" ( I 991 a: 330).

Jameson recognizes that these marginalized groups represent the questions raised

by millions who have been discarded not only by the system itself but by the traditional

left as welt. There is no denying that the issues and claims raised by these microgroups

are a fresh set of political demands which transform and give a new dimension to the very

concept of the political in late capitalism. Though he acknowledges the value of politics at

the micro-level, why is Jameson unwilling to give in to micropolitical practice? The

answer i s unequivocal:

Politics works only when these two levels [the local and the global] can be

coordinated. They otherwise drif? apart into a disembodied and easily

bureaucratized abstract struggle for and around the state, on the one hand,

and a properly interminable series of neighbourhood issues on the other.

(1991a: 330)

Genuine political changes, in other words, by which society can be meaningful1y

transformed, can be brought about only at the systemic level. Struggles at the

micropolitical level remain ineffective unless they represent struggles, or are allegories

for transformation at the systemic level. Jameson reminds us that the dynamics of the

commitment to social change are derived from

the objective experience o f social reality and the way in which one isolated

cause or issue, one specific form of injustice, cannot be fulfilled or

correlated without eventually drawing the entire web of intemelaed social

levels together into a totality, $vhich then demands the invention of a

politics of social transformation. (1 990a: 25 1 )

Douglas Kellner remarks that what jameson prosects here is an "Althusserian totality of

relatively autonomous levels which reciprocally interact within a decentered structural

totality" (1 989d: 3 1). "Far Althusser, as for Jameson," says Steven Best. "unity is

achieved on1 y through difference" ( I 989: 347).

The politics that Jameson speaks about in the passage quoted above is a

revolutionary socialist politics which is systemic in nature coordinating all these

autonomous levels or instances of society in an effective manner. Any meaningful politics

of difference, he i s sure, is made possible only when "a considerable degree of social

standardization comes into being, that is to say, [when] universal identity is largely

secured." Rut it has to be understood that the kind of "radical difference that holds

between Columbus and the people he encountered can never be articulated into a politics"

(Jameson 1994a: 66). Acknowledging the value of this argument for systemic .politics

Sean Homer writes that at a time when theories of the politics of difference try to jettison

changes at the systemic level "Jarneson's reassertion of the need to retain some notion,

albeit utopian, of complete social transformation is singularly important" (1998: 178).

This totalizing concept for social transformation, Victor t i remarks, "will remain long

after Marxism's distorted official and institutional forms have passed away" ( I 99 1 : 140).

.lameson's view, referred to above, that the ideology of pluralism is nothing but

liberal tolerance is vindicated by Eagleton's observation that the politics of difference

cannot go "beyond traditional liberalism." Postmodernism with its acknowledged zest, he

writes,

for plurality, multiplicity, provisionality, anti-totality, open-endedness and

the rest, has the look of a sheepish liberalism in wolfs clothing. . . .

Differences cannot fully flourish while men and women languish under

forms of exploitation; and to combat those forms effectively implicates

ideas 01' humanity which are necessarily universal. ( 1 997: 1 20-2 1 )

It is this necessity for changes at the systemic level that Jameson highlights in his

totalizing critique of the politics of difference projected by the social movements. His

opinions on these small groups have much in common with what Eagleton has to say

about them. Pluralism, it has to be said, though seemingly encourages differences among

the various groups, "refuses to recognize that what different . . . groups have in common

socially and economically is finally more important than their cultural differences" ( 1 997:

I 22). No one will deny that these marginal i7ed groups have been subjected to exploitation

and imrniseration by capitalism. What they have in common is more important for "the

purposes of their political emancipation" (Eagleton 1997: 1 22). So, the hasic plank of

cultural difference on which these microgroups are constructed is ':just the flipside of a

spurious universalism'" and, what 3amesoa advocates is a revolutionary systemic change

to socialism whose political goal will be "the emancipation of difference at the level of

human mutuality or reciprocity" (Eagleton 1997: 120).

Jameson's insistence on the need to retain a conception of revolutionary class

politics is consistent with the aim of his texts since Murxi.~m und Form to set the critical

and political function of Marxist totalization against the currently fashionable

poststructuralist theories promoting nominalism in the name of pluralism. "The argument

about system," Jarneson writes, "that everything in society is ultimately connected to

everything else" and that "in the long run it is impossible to achieve the most minimal

reforms without first changing everything." that is to say, the system as a whole, has been

stigmatized as a notion of totality by poststructuralist theories (1996a: 36). Victor 1,i

comments that it is "in h e name of difference, flux, dissemination and heterogeneity" that

the poststructuralists repudiate totality, but, to Jameson, "the new ideologies of difference,

like the old positivisms they had replaced, merely 'reconfirm the status of the concept of

totality by their very reaction against it'." Their ideologies predicated on pluralism,

"[tlhough advocating openness," and seemingly "more openly political," writes Li,

"really function as local forms of closure. 'strategies of containment"' that obstruct "any

concerted political programme of radical change" (1 99 1 : 1 32). Though Jmeson's project

of totalization is "beset with problems," concludes Li, it is at the same time "the strongest

theoretical aspect of [his] work" ( I 99 1 : 140).

Jameson's critique of the nominalist tendencies of the micropolitical groups, as

explained above, shows how the postmodernist ideology of pluralism and the r

poststructuralist anti-systemic valorization of differences reproduce late capitalism's own

logic of proliferation and differentiation. He feels that the poststructuralist call to wage

war on totality is misplaced and what is really at stake in the "wars on totality" is the very

concept of Utopia, which, in other words, can be explained as "the systemic

transformation of contemporary society" (199 t a: 334). For Jameson the concept of social

totality has great significance for any genuine politics aimed at transformation of society

and %ithout such a concept "no properly socialist politics is possible" ( 1 988d: 355). In

other words, the aspiration towards totality points "toward a collective project" ( 1 988e:

60). And. the rejection of the concept of totality for the sake of pluralism and the politics

of difference implies a rejection of the possibility of transforming the capitalist system

itself.

This argument of Jameson i s supported by the following observation of David

1-larvey who, emphasizing '?he potential connection between place and social identity . . .

manif'ttst in political action," says that the dilemmas consequent on the uneven

development of capital are shared by "the socialist working class movements" and the

postmodern micropolitical groups in the face of "a universalizing capitalism." These

groups, he continues, are "relatively empowered to organize in place but disempowered

when it comes to organizing over space." This happens because when they cling on to

their place bound identity they give themselves in to be "a part of the very fragmentation

whjch a mobile capitalism and flexible accumulation can feed upun." Though Harvey

acknowledges the potential of these groups for localized resistance he is convinced that

"they cannot bear the burden of radical historical change done" ( 1989: 303).

The "political motivation" of the "war on totality" and the association of the 5

concept ol' totality with "'I'error" and totalitarianism, Jameson says, lies "in a fear of

ITtopia" and Utopian revolutionary politics (1991a: 401). He suggests that this is, in fact,

a notion as old as Edmund Burke but revived successfully by the Cold War rhetoric.

"Ideologically." this rhetoric "turns on a bizarre identification of Stalin's gulags with

Hitler' s extermination camps." Jamestln argues that contrary to what this rhetoric tries to

propagate the history of revolutionary convulsions proves that "violence springs from

counterrevolutions first and foremost" and that "the most effective form of

counterrevolution lies precisely in this transmission of violence tn the revolutionary

process itself." He obsewes that the allegation of terrorism on the totalizing process i s

'-idealistic, i f not finally a replay of doctrines of original sin in their worst religious sense"

(1 991 a: 401 -02). Eagleton wants us to ask ourselves why it is that "just at the historical

moment when the system was becoming more 'total' than ever some radical intellectuals

hegan to denounce the whole notion of totality as a bad dream" (1 997: 128). In the

previous chapter reference was made to Lyotard's efforts to identify all totalizing

thoughts and grand narratives that proposed human emancipation from the nightmare of

history with terrorism and totalitarianism. Lyotard was one of those earliest postmodern

theorists who opposed the notion of consensus for the sake of "differences" and for

"honoring the name." H e also gave the call for the war on totality. Darko Suvin,

explaining the strange origins of the connotations of the word totalitarianism, writes that

"[tlhey arose after the [Second World] war, propagated by the Congress of Cultural

Freedom" and "funded by the CIA" (1 988: 359).

It has been argued that Jarneson's logic of totali7ation homogenizes not just the

cultural universe of Western Europe but that of the Third World as well (Aijaz Ahmad

1 991 : 95-1 22, Neil T,arsen 1988: xix-xxi, Sean Homer 1998: 169-72). in order to see how

far these arguments are justified it is necessary to exmine Jameson's observations on the

Third World. First of all it has to he understood that in Jameson's language "third world"

includes '?hose inner colonized of the First World--- 'minorities', marginds, and women

--- fully as much as i ts external subjects and official 'natives'." Following Sartre's

"Preface" to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of lhe Eurth Jameson says that it was only during

the nineteen sixties that these "natives" became "human kings" ( I 988b: 1 8 1). It is true

that the majority of these natives were the decolonized new "subjects of history." But, as

Jameson rightly points out, "decolonization historically went hand in hand with

neocolonialism" meaning that one form of domination and exploitation was replaced by

another. Thus, liberation, very ambiguously, meant only the "separation" fmm an older

system of domination. Jameson says that it was "something like the replacement of the

British Empire by the IMF" and other newly constituted international financial/monetary

organizations. This "dialectical combination of decoloni~ation and neo-colonialism" i s

explained in terms of the technological revolution popdarly called Green Revolution

whose purpose it was to "free the world from hunger." Jameson argues that during the

modern period capitalist penetration of the Third World did not tamper with its traditional

modes of production which were mostly "leR intact" and "exploited by a more political

and military structure." But the Green Revolution carried "this penetration and expansion

of the 'logic of capital"' to a new stage wherein the older structure was "systematically

destroyed to he replaced by an industrial agricd ture" (1 98% 1 84-85). 'l'hc consequences

were, obviously, disastrous. Jameson writes:

The organic social relations of village societies are now shattered, an

enormous landless proletariat L'produced," which migrates to the urban

areas . . . while new, proletarian wage-working forms of agricultural labour

replaced the older collective or traditional kinds. Such [is the] ambiguous

liberation. ( 1 988b: 1 85)

With the globalization of capital, the opening of the markets of these areas and the

weakening of the national governments, to which reference has already been made, the

immiseration of the Third World has been more intense. Thus, Robert Young's argument,

to which Sean Homer refers, that Jarneson defines the Third World "solely in terms of its

experience of colonialism" and that it "simply reduplicates the history of European

colonialism" does not take these statements off meson into consideration (1 998: 64).

Criticisms that Jameson' s totalizing hypothesis tends to uniustifiably generalize

and thus suppress the plurality and diversity of 'Third World experiences and culture are

summed up by Perry Anderson thus:

The gravamen o f the charge against his theory is that it ignores or

suppresses practices in the periphery that not only cannot be

accommodated within the categories of the postmodem, but actively reject

them. For these critics, post-colonial culture is inherent1 y more

oppositional, and far more political than the postmodemism of the centre.

( 1 999: I 18)

The charges that Anderson refers to also do not take into consideration the emphatic

staternenis that Jameson has made in his discussion of Third World literature and other

cultural forms of the marginalized people. Jameson has categorically expressed his views

on the radical potential of the cultural products of those on the periphery in several of his

essays. t-le describes the third world as "the development of under-development" and says

that the United States has become "the biggest third world country, because of

unemployment, non-production, the flight of factories and so on" ( 1 988c: 17). Recause of

this unevenness in development which is inherent to the capitalist system he finds a

"strange coexistence" in contemporary America of "social worlds as rigidly divided from

each other as in a caste system" which he describes as the "permanent Third World

existence at the heart of the First World" (1977a: 852). In terms of statistical data and

their comparison with the third world countries which have more unemployment and

nonproduction and poverty this may seem somewhat exaggaated, hut there i s truth in

what he says, and especially of the cultural texts produced from the "internal" Third

World of the United States. "black women's literature or Chicano literature" ( 1 990b: 49).

He acknowledges the negative edge of the third world and the revolutionary potential of

their "collective subject, &centered but not schizophrenic" which emerges in many of the

cultural expressions of the marginalized (1 988c: 2 1). Jmeson also argues that the Third

World has to be looked at in a different way, "not merely because of decolonization and

political independence, but above all because these enormously varied cultures all now

speak in their own distinctive voices" (1990b: 48). He does not consider all of their

literatures to be so marginal that they can easily he overlooked. At least [,atin American

literature, he says, "has today become perhaps the principal player on the scene of world

cu~ture." and it has an undeniable effect and influence not only on other Third World

culture but on First World literature and culture as well (t990b: 48-9).

In the context of neocolonidism and the position of the 'Ihird World as the new

imperial subject's "other" it becomes imperative that some specific engagement with the

question of Third World literature be done. Jameson says that the "enormous variety" of

the Third World cultures is in ''various distinct ways locked in a life-and-death struggle

with First World cultural imperialism itself' that is "a reflection of the economic situation

of such areas in their penetration by various stages of capitalism" (1986a: 140). And

because of the dialectical relationship between them discussed above a study of the third

world culture "implies a new view of [the First World] from the outside" and "Third

World cultures offer a more unvarnished and challenging image of [the First World]"

( 1986a: 1 40). Third World cultures are examined "in the light of the Marxian concept o f

'modes ol' production"' and Jameson suggests that African culture exemplifies "the

symbiosis of capital and tribal societies;" China and India exhibit the "engagement o f

capitalism with the great empires of the so called Asiatic mode" while Latin America

involves "an earlier destruction of imperial systems" and "an indirect economic

penetration and control" which Asia and Africa had experienced on1 y afier decolonization

( I 986a: 141).

These are only the "initial distinctions" that Jameson makes. But the most

important and perhaps the most controversial statement that Jameson ha7 made on Third

World cuiture is his "sweeping hypothesis" that

All Third World texts are necessarily . . . allegorical and . . . they are to be

read as . . . national allegories . . . particularly when their forms develop

out of essentially Western machineries of representation. . . . Those texts

. . . project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story

of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled

situation of the public Third World cuhure and society. ( 1 986a: 141 -42)

Substantiating this claim Jameson offers a reading of the Chinese writer i,u Xun's works

and the Senegalese writer and film maker Ousmane Sembene's novel Xcclu and claims

that they suggest that "a literary article could be a political act with real consequences"

( 1 986a: 150). But the First World texts differ fiom these texts in that the former articulate

a "radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political,"

between "the domain of sexuality and the unconscious" and "the public world of classes,

the economic, and secular political power" ( I 986a: 1 4 1) .

Critics from the Third World have had difficulties in coming to terms with this

totalization of Jameson that tends to homogenize all Third World cultures despite

acknowledging their plurality. Aijaz Ahmad complains that Jameson's "ambitious

undertaking" of "the construction of 'a theory o f the cognitive aesthetics of third wodd

literature"' suppresses "the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both

the advanced capitalist countries on the one hand, and the imperialized formations on the

other" and argues that Jameson constructs "a binary opposition" of First and Third World

categories (1992: 95). Ahmad contends that there are "literary, cultural and political

pressures as well as an ideological conjuncture" in the posing of "a unitary category'' of

Third World literature (1992: 43). Theoretically no "internally coherent" Third World

literature can be constructed because it is epistemologically impossible to have such an

objec~. Ahmad's argument is that "major literary traditions" of Thircl World countries in

Asia and Africa remain unknown to the First World and in such a situation the

formulation of a "cognitive theory" of third-world literature on the basis of the scantly

available data is "an alarming undertaking." Jameson's conceptualization itself is

"central1 y grounded in a binary opposition between a First and a Third World." Recause it

is will well-nigh impossible to "speak of any fundamental differences within particular

national structures," differences of "class or of gender formations," .lameson is forced to

"minimize" and "absolutize" the differences between the First and the Third Worlds.

Since Jameson's definition of the Third World rests on "its 'experience of colonialism

and imperialism',"' the political category that follows from this is that of "'the nation'

with nationalism as the peculiarly valorized ideology." dameson's theory of "the 'national

allegory' as the metatext is thus inseparable from the larger Three Worlds Theory which

permeates" his text (1992: 92-8). Ahmad argues that analytically, Jameson's definition of

the Three Worlds in terms of their production systems "leaves the so-called Third World

in limbo" and it is unsure where the different Third World countries belong in Jameson's

system of binary opposition between the First and Third Worlds because Jameson's

classification "is empirically ungrounded in any facts" ( 1 992: 1 00-01 ).

Tn Jameson' s homogenization of the cultural differences the differences between

the First and the Third World are "absolutized as an Otherness, but the enormous cultural

heterogeneity of social formations within the so-called Third World is submerged within

a singular identity of experience," writes Ahmad (1 992: 104). Jameson's absolute locating

of capitalism and socialism in the First and Second Worlds respectively "freezes and

defiistoricizes the global space within which struggles between these great motivating

forces actually take place" (1992: t 05). The "emphatic insistence" of Jameson that

"nutioaa? experience is central to the cognitive formation of the Third World intellectual,'"

Ahmad says, slips into "a much wider and far less demarcated vocabulary of 'culture',

'society' [and] 'collectivity'." But, he asks, "[alre 'nation' and 'collectivity' the same

thing?'(l992: 109). He points out that even during the period when anticolonial

nationalist struggle was at its height there has not been a single novel in IIrdu which

directly or exclusively treats "the experience of colonialism and imperialism." This theme

is only "woven into many of these novels, but never in an exclusive or even a dominant

emphasis" (1 992: 1 1 8). In addition to these problems that Jameson's text betrays, it is

dubbed "gendered" and "determined by a certain racial milieu" ( 1992: 122).

R. Radhakrishnan also alleges that Jameson speaks "all too glibly about 'the return

of nationalism' in the Third World as though nationalism were enjoying a re-run in the

Third World." Sean Homer, complaining of Jameson's "sweeping over-generalking

statement," asks whether we can "really reduce the diversity and heterogeneity of all

Third World literature to examples of two writers" and on that basis "can we seriously

argue that Third World literature a l w ~ . s constitutes national allegories?' ( I 998: 63).

Homer argues that the category of the Third World plays "an ambiguous role in

Jameson's theorizing" and that it provides "a dialectical contrary to the First World as an

absent centre within postmodernism and as a sign of the final globalization of late

capitalism" (1 998: 64).

It has to be agreed that Jarneson's hypothesis on Third World culture has its

problems of overgeneralization and oversimplification. His method of totalizing, it has

already been pointed out, is a conscious political choice with the specific intention of

attempting to cognitively map the system. By this Jameson is not denying the individual

identity of the national traditions or the multiplicity of Third World culture. On the other

hand, he is calling for "an internationalization of national situations" and attempting to

formulate a new methodology for literary and cultural studies in which the new !-

internationalism is recognized (1987d: 22). Aijaz Ahmad and other critics do not seem to

take into consideration the tactical assumptions, the provisjonul nature, and the pedagogic

perspective of Jameson's views on l l i r d World literature. in the essay "State of the

Subject (111)" Jarneson argues that "one of the new tasks of the university system in the

First World is to come to terms with the immense richness of Third World cultures and

literatures . . . when, for better or for worse, the unification of the globe is [hecoming] a

reality" (1987d: 17). The Third world cultural documents are important not just fiom the

pedagogic perspective and in the new context of the globalization of capital but they are

also of crucial significance to the First World insofar as they may reveal "the dynamic of

dependence and resistance, exploitation and internal development" (Jameson 1 987d: 23).

Jameson's repeated assertion that his aim in the essay w a ~ not to propose any authentic

theory o f Third World culture but to imagine a 6'relational way of thinking about global

culture, so that we cannot henceforth think 'First World' literature in isolation from that

of other global spaces" seems to go unnoticed in the above mentioned criticisms

(Jarneson, quoted in Wise 1994: 186). fameson also says that "the vitality of a certain

nationalism" has to be respected and we have to be "attentive to the structural and

historical difference of national situation of other cultures" (1 987d: 25). The "relational

way of thinking" is a methodology in which the First World is "'compared and relativized

along with everyone else" (Jarneson 1 987d: 25).

Acknowledging that Jameson's approach to Third World culture is "nut without

its failings and insufficiencies" Christopher Wise asserts that his "theoretical position has

both pragmatic and epistemological value in both the First and the Third Worlds." It is

valuable for its "illuminating insight" and i t s "liberating potential or for its ability to

motivate praxis that may contribute towards altering the most pressing issue of our time:

the systemic underdevelopment of the Third World" (Wise 1994: 174-5). Wise says that

Jameson's concern in the essay i s to "alert First World intellectuals, academics and critics

to their arrogance and blindness in neglecting Third World literature." His purpose, Wise

argues, is ro "promote the dissemination of Third World literature and to emphasize the

interrelatedness of world cultures" (1994: 188, n.15). Literary and cultural documents

from these widely divergent geographical regions are "intrinsically valuable for their own

communities'' but "as 'SO many structural variants of the development of national

capitalism"' they are much valuable to other regions as well. Jarnewt's attempt to

fbrmulate a "relational way of thinking about global culture" offers "a truly global (or

decentered) means of conceptualizing both the radical differences and identity of

contemporary human situations." This, Wise concludes, is not '"orientalidng' Third

World literature, as Ahmad charges," but "a practical and useful methodology" by which

the West is compared and relativized with all others (Wise 1994: 1 86). Aijaz h a d ' s

criticism, writes Wise, "distorts and caricatures" Jameson' s theoretical position and

suggests that he "adopts the persona of wounded and betrayed comrade, a rhetorical

strategy that is both offensive towards Jameson and patently unfair" (1 994: 174). The

charges of racialism and gender prejudices that Ahmad levels against Jameson can also be

considered as part of the distortion that Wise speaks about.

Jameson himself has said that tactically his intentions, in the essay, were "teaching

third world literatures; the recognition of the challenge they pose to even the most

advanced contemporary theory; the need for a rational way of thinking global culture . . .

a comparative study of cultural situations" (Jameson, quoted in Layoun 1990: 14). Mary

Layoun says that Jameson implies that the very division of First. Second and Third

Worlds has been a construct of "imperial power" and they have to be understood as

"examples of Edward Said's 'imaginary geography"' (1 990: 14). Jarneson realizes that in

the postmodern conditions the new imperial master's "view from the top is

epistemologically crippling" and, hence, the aim of his provisional hypothesis i s to make

the First World realize this and to make it confront with the daily reality of the other two-

thirds of the globe ( 1986a: 1 58). This seems to be in keeping with Ngugi wa 'I'hiong'o's

call to the Western writer to

expose to his European audience the naked reality of the relationship

between Europe and the Third World. He has to show to his European

reader that, to paraphrase Rrecht, the water he drinks is often taken from

the mouths of the thirsty in the Third World and the food he eats is

snatched from the mouths of the hungry in Asia, Africa and South

America. (quoted in Gugelberger 199 1 : 505).

This is exactly what Jameson means when he says, using the Hegelian metaphor of the

Master-Slave relationship, that "the Slave is called upon to labour for the Master and to

furnish him with all the material benefits befitting his supremacy" ( 1 986a: 1 58) . 'l'he

"greatest misfortune" that has happened to the Third World societies, he says, has been

the discovery of vact oil resources because it has been "something which. far from

representing salvation . . . sinks them incalculably into a sea of foreign debts they can

ncver dream of liquidating." Jameson observes that contemporary experiences in Third

World societies can be characterized as "'cultural imperialism', a faceless influence

without representable agents, whose literary expression seems to demand the invention of

new forms" ( 1 986a: 1 53-4).

Ti is Sameson's contention that only the Third World knows what the reality of

History is, what the "nightmare of history" is, and, hence the First World has to realize

what the limitations of its perspective from the top are and accordingly it has to

acknowledge "the epistemological priority" of the aIlegorical vision of 'll-rird World

literature ( 1 986a: 158). It is based on this unique capacity of Third World literatures to

represent reality and their expressive themati~ation of the political that Jarneson describes

them as "situational" and "rnaterialistn(l 986a: 157). Each individual story thus becomes

the expression of the collectivity itself. Jameson emphasizes that in 'nird World texts we

have an inversion of this: in them "libidinal investment" is to be read in "primarily

political and social terms" and it is based on this relationship which shapes the cultural

forms that he says that Third World cultural documents can be read as national allegories

( 1 986a: 144). He argues that "in nonhegemonic situations, or in situations of economic or

cultural subalternity. there tends to he a reference to the national situation that is always

present and always t l t in a way that it cannot be in the dominant culture of the

superstate" (1988~: 26). The relationship between "the libidinal and the political

components of the individual and social experience" in the First World i s articulated in

their cultural documents where "po~itical commitment is recontained and psychologized

or subjectivized by way of the public-private split" ( I 986a: 144).

In the Indian context that he invokes Aijaz Ahrnad does not find any Urdu novel

in which there is an exclusive treatment of the experiences of colonial domination or

national liberation movement. But he agrees that these experiences are "woven into"

many Urdu novels and that there are short stories in the Urdu language that directly deal

with these subjects. Ahmad also finds it difficult to point out a fictional narrative in Urdu

where the "issue of coIonialism or the difficulty of a civilizational encounter between the

English and the Indian has the same primacy" as in Passage to India or The Raj Quarter

(1992: 118). To insist that these experiences of colonialism and nationalism need to be

treated exclusively in fiction so as to be read as narrating the nation is asking too much.

But. to go by the spirit of Aijaz Ahmad's own argument, the nation i s not narrated by the

Urdu language alone. K. Satchidanandan, writing on the concept of a national culture and

an Indian literature, points out that the nationalist consciousness is very much there in the

Bengali, Hindi. Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Punjabi, and Malayalam literatures of the 1 930s and

1940s. To establish his point he quotes Frantz Fanon's observation that a "nationd culture

is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify

and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in

existence" (1999: 25) . Satchidanandan says that Rabindranath 'Tagore's "paradigmatic

text" Gorct illustrates this best. Ti deals with the encounter between the modern British and

the traditional Indian culture and calls for "a synthesis of modem values and traditional

culture." It "sets the agenda for those who wish to fight colonialism" by presenting the

protagonist Gora's rebellion to dislocate the colonial system. (Satchidanandan 1999: 23-

26). The Malayalam writer Chandu Menon's novel Indulekha written in 1889 can be

described as one which discusses social issues generated by the encounter between

English and the culture of Kerala. The Punjabi writer Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid's novels Ik

Sikh Ghrirunu, Sukhi Parivar, Sresht KuEan di Chul, Sushi2 fidhwu, ,Tubhug Kuur and

Dampuli Pyur are all concerned with the problems "typical of the cultural duality

engendered by British rule" (Sekhon and Duggal 1992: 240). It can also be pointed out, in

Sameson's defence, that among the Third World countries "nationalism" and "global

American post-modemist culture" have been the most common denominators, more

common than the "other choice" of "join[ing] the 'Second World'," as A i j a Ahmad has

indicated (1 999: 101). It was in the period between 1 955-75 that most o f the Third World

countries through their nationalist movements liberated themselves from the colonial

yoke and the llnited States established its global hegemony in the post-war geopolitical

scenario. Aijaz Ahmad himself says that it was during the post-war years and as a

"contradictory consequence of decolonization" that all "zones of capital" were integrated

into a single global market "entirely dominated by this supreme imperialist power" (1992:

2 1 ). Jameson's emphasis all through his analysis of postmodernism has been on this very

globalization of capital, the dominant role of the United States in the process and the

consequences of the penetration of capital into those hitherto precapitalist geographical

areas. And that is precisely the reason why he describes postmodernism as "the cultural

logic of late capitalism."

Ai-jm Ahmad himself ha7 written about '?he unstoppable dynamic of

decolonization" throughout ,Asia and Africa and the "dynamic of an anticolonial struggle"

during the post-war years, all the while insisting that the process of decolonization was

"no uniform matter." He also says that it was this period which saw the "emergence of the

United States" as "the hegemonic capitalist power" ( 1 992: 1 8-2 1 ), Jameson's essay on

Third World literature, writes Burnharn, is "the site for massive insecurity, not case of

assertion: insecurity with the US hegemony, with the institutions of the academy, with the

status of First World i ntcllectuals" (1 995: 1 56). Regarding the nature of the anticolonial

nationalist movements in the Afro-Asian region, no one would argue that there was

uniformity in these struggles. Jameson does not invoke nationalism rn a uniform category.

Aijm Ahmd spe& of "many different kinds of ideologies and political practices"

involved in nationalism and the distinction between "progressive and retrograde kinds of

practices" of nationalism (1 992: 7). Jameson, quoting Tom Nairn, points to "the existence

of two brands of nationalism, one healthy, and one morbid" and suggests that "[bloth

progress and regress are inscribed in its genetic code from the start" (1 981 a: 298). But,

despite the variety of interests involved in the nationalist struggles, what makes it possible

for classifying them a an operational category is their anticolonial nature. In the case of

the Indian subcontinent itself, no well meaning historian would equate the interests that

led to the formation of India and Pakistan; but the fact remains that the two new nations

were decolonized as a result of the same anticolonial struggle led by the nationalist

movement which had the participation of almost all sections o f society with varying

interests. and that the people of the two territorial regions had experienced the same

colonial supremacy and exploitation. So is the case of African and Latin American

nations which were colonized by different European powers who had different kinds of

interests in their respective colonies. That the national leaderships of these states could

not keep these forces together for long afier decolonization is a different matter

altogether. The interests of the British Imperial power were different in its colonies spread

across the world and these interests were antagonistic to French or Spanish or Portuguese

or Dutch interests in their colonies. In other words, each territory was colonized by the

European powers for different reasons. But, the fact remains that they were colonies

exploited by the colonizer at different historical conjunctures. These differing interests of

the various colonizers at different historical moments and the experiences of the

colonized are designated colonial interests and colonial experiences respectively. And,

common to the colonial experience all over the world was oppression and exploitation---

political, economic, social and cultural: an experience of suhalternity. Jameson's

emphasis, obviously, is on the "collective energies" of nationalism which successhUy

overthrew the colonial powers, and, this has to be the progressive form of nationalism. He

warns that "a Left which cannot grasp the immense Utopian appeal of nationalism ... can

scarcely hope to 'reappropriate' such collective energies and must effectively doom itself

to political impotence" ( 1 98 1 a: 298).

Radhakrishnan's view that LLhistorically 'nationalism' is new to the 'I'hird World"

does not seem to take history into consideration, at least in the case of India. Even before

India attained nationhood there had been an Indian literature and an Indian culture that

transcended linguistic and regional boundaries and shared the same values, traditions,

heritage, myths, experiences and concerns. But this is not to suggest that Indian culture

and literature are monolithic formations unified by these shared values and concerns.

What is suggested is that despite the innumerable diversities that demarcate and identify

each region there are certain vibrant things common to dl of them that make them part of

a pan-Indian unity. ?'he logic of the issue of the heterogeneity of Third World culture that

Radhakrishnan and Aijaz Ahmad raise can be used in the case of the concept of First

World culture as well. But, as Gugelberger says. it i s also to be understood that Jameson

uses "Third World literature" only as "an operational term" (1 994: 5 1 7). Radhakrishnan

comments that the "allegorical lenses through which [Jameson] perceives the Third World

will not let him see the devastation brought about by Western imperialism and

colonialism" (1 989: 329, n.2). This, to say the least, reflects Radhakrishnan's own failure

to properly understand the Jamesonian text. .Tameson's works are permeated with his

thoughts and observations on the devastation inflicted by capitalism not just on any

specific geographical region of the world but to the whole of humanity at various stages

of its development. His essays on postmodemism dwell at length on the devastation

caused by capitalist penetration in the Third World also, details of' which have been

discussed earlier. Jameson has defined national allegory

as a formal attempt to bridge the increasing gap between the existing data

of everyday life within a given nation-state and the structural tendency of

monopoly capital to develop on a world wide scale. essentially

transnational scale. . . . [E,]ike any form it must be read as an instable and

provisory solution to an aesthetic dilemma which is itself the manifestation

of a social and historical contradiction. ( 1 979a: 94)

In his essays on postmodernism as well as in the one on Third World literature it has been

Jameson's consistent effort to explain how capitalist penetration has been responsible for

this contradiction. And Jarneson's purpose, contradictory to what these critics allege as

the integration of Third World literature into the Western canon, is "to identify 'with the

wretched of the earth'" and "to learn from the 'I'hird world writer how to look into what is

really going on in the world" and also "to try to end colonialism and neocolonialism,

political and mental" (Gugelberger 1994: 506). Through this reality of the "tangible

medium of daily life" in the Third World in its "vivid and experiential w a y s ' b e sense

"the abstract truth of class" which makes possible genuine class consciousness, and, in the

Third World narratives the classes "become in some sense characters in their own right."

This is the sense, Jameson says, in which the term allegory is to be taken as "a working

hypothesis" (1 992a: 38).

Georg Gugelberger draws attention to a very crucial distinction upon which all

literature is to he defined. He says that literature has to be evaluated on the basis of

questions like "By whom?", "For whom?'and '"gainst whom?" If we accept this

proposition, a writer like Jorge Luis Borges cannot be considered a Third World writer

because his work belongs to the established Western canon, whereas Pablo Neruda is

"obviously a Third World writer." Thus, he writes, "Third World" is an "operational

rather than analytical" category in fameson's use. Gugelberger refers to Peter Nazareth's

Fanonian definition of the Third World which describes it as "an identity with the

wretched of the earth" irrespective of geographical, gender and racial criteria, an identity

"to determine to end a11 exploitation and oppression." This definition foregrounds the

"political message" in all genuine Third World literature which often "tends to he

allegorical and didactic." Referring to Barbara Harlow's observation associating Third

World literature with "the theme of resistance, with the conscious formation of a counter-

hegemonic discourse" and to her theory of an "organization of literary categories which is

'participatory' in the historical processes of hegemony and resistance to domination,"

Gugelberger says that '%her term resistance lirerature is a more concrete designation for

Third Wodd 1,iterature." He comes to the conclusion that "all genuine Third World

Literature fights for the expulsion of all forms of colonialism and dependency and

therefore truly is resistance literature" and that "liberation can be considered the authentic

theme of all true Third World Literature" ( I 994: 508- 14).

dameson has faith in the radical potential of this marginalized literature. In

"Reificati on and Utopia in Mass Culture" he writes:

The only authentic cultural production today has seemed to be that which

can draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of the social life

of the world system: black literature and blues, British working-class rock,

women's literature, gay literature, the roman quebecois, the literature of

the Third World; and this production is possible only to the degree to

which these foms of collective life or colIective solidarity have not yet

been fully penetrated by the market and by the commodity system. (1992a:

23 -24)

Jameson's concern implied in this and other observations on Third World literature

referred to above is the class prejudices of canonized Western literature in which is

echoed the voice of the hegemonic European White Male. The canonized "cultural

monuments and traces of the past," Sameson says, are all "profoundly ideological" with

"vested interests in and a functional relationship to social formations based on violence

and exploitation." A Marxist hermeneutics has to restore the meaning of the cultural

forms, a process which "cannot be separated from a passionate and partisan assessment of

everything that is oppressive in them and that knows complicity with privilege and

domination" (198Ta: 299). Any real historical analysis of cultural forms has to unearth

and re-create the voices of the marginalized sections of society, the voices of resistance

which are strafegically contained in these very forms. This re-creation has tcl he done in

the light of their real historical material conditions evidences of which will he available in

those cultural texts. When this re-creation is done from a sociological perspective what

we have is a kind of "re-discovery" of something that has been alienated or marginalized

in the past. It i s not difficult to understand that this is exactly what happens in the much

celebrated and commercially organized national and intemationai "cultural festivals"

where many specimens of these marginalized cultural forms are exhibited. Divested of

their social and historical conditions they remain mere reified, mediatized images meant

to be commercially consumed by aesthetic consumers. This is also part o f the strategies of

containment adopted by the legitimating process of the hegernonic capitalist ideology in

which the voices of resistance are coopted into the capitalist system and silenced.

Jarneson's exercise in the attempted theorization of Third World literature

functions as a warning against suck strategies of containment. It is not that he does not

recognize or is unwilling to acknowledge the cultural potential of the differential histories

of Third World countries. That is why he agrees with Roberto Retamer's

"internationalization of national situations" (1989~: xi). Th is internationalization is not a

process of totalization which subsumes and destroys the differences of or within nations.

The very articulation of the cultural differences of the Third World that Jameson

undertakes is a dialectical process o f recognizing and questioning the Other. Jameson

observes that in Retamer's intemationatixation the Third World (as the marginalized) is

not being subsumed into a "homogeneous Other of the West" nor does he "vacuously

celebrate the astonishing pluralism of human cultures" ( 1 9 8 7 ~ : xi-xii). He says that "we

want something like a new internationalism" which is not monolithic but which "must

undo the temptation of isolationism and specialization." Within this internationalism he

respects "the vitality of a certain nationalism." Jameson's prnposal of this new "cultural

internationalism" is "an internationalism of national situations" that primarily attends to

"the structural and historical difference of national situations of other countries" (1987d:

24-5). Jameson's own essay on Third World culture can be considered as an attempt to

internationalize Third World national situations in the new postmodern situation created

by the globalization of capital. His observation that "the view from the top is

epistemologically crippling" is itself an acknowledgement of the lopsided perspective of

the Western canon which needs to be reformulated in the light of such a knowledge

(1 986a: 1 58) .

A11 said and done, there are problems in Jameson's hypothetical assessment of

Third World culture. The argument that 'Third World cultural texts are material is rather

weak and contradicts its own spirit when Jameson attempts to discover a metaphysical

subjectivity that transcends all boundaries and is common to all Third World. Rut the

metacriticism that Jameson recommends is a reminder to the Western world of the

weaknesses of its own canon. It advises the First World to be responsible for its nwn

lopsided views on culture and aesthetics and "seeks to cany out the political task of

educating the American public" (Burnham 1995: 155). Jameson compels the West not

only to acknowledge the identity of Third World culture but also to understand the social

reality around the world from the cultural texts of the Third World. Obviousiy, this

suggestion of Jameson has the definite political purpose of assisting the development of a

class consciousness potent enough to give concrete form to a global praxis to successfully

resist the hegemonic forces of postmodemism. He is convinced that only a collective

subject will be able to perform this task and thus be the agent of history. Rut this cannot

be the fragmented schizophrenic subject of the West and simultaneously it has to be

decentered as well. And, it is this decentered collective subject that he finds in Third

W o l d narratives. Tn an interview with Anders Stepbanson Jameson speaks about a

coilective, decentered subject that emerges in some forms of storytelling in Third World

literature. "neither personal in the modernist sense nor depersonalized in the pathological

sense of the schizoid text." He explains that the subject is decentered because the stories

you narrate as an individual subject "don't belong to you. You don't control them the way

the master sub+ject of modernism would" (1988~: 21). It is such a decentered collective

subject that can perform the role of the historical agent potent enough lo challenge the

capitalist hegemony. Thus, it is the allegoriaation of various subject positions that we find

in such cultural texts. John Hoppe observes that Edward Barthwaite's "overt concern" for

representing "the historical trajectory of his people" simply reinforces Jmeson's point

about allegory which i s "not a choice" but "a constitutive element of 'Third World

literature." Thus Third World culture and literature can justifiably be considered '%he

reflection of a people's struggle---the primary economic and ideological struggle brought

to Ihe level of figure and language" (Hoppe 1992: 93-4). John McGowan says that

Jameson has to be "emulated" rather than "chastised" for his "resolute retention of the

image of collective action and the necessity o f interpreting both the possibility of action

and its appropriate strategies on the basis of a theoretical attempt to comprehend the

social whole" (1 991 : 1 58).

It has already been pointed out that with the globalization of capital, the market

penetration of popular culture accelerated by the media, and the neo-imprialist

domination, the Third World, though decolonized, has now come under the direct

influence nf capitalism. This i s true in the case of those countries which were never

colonized and also in the case of those Latin American regions which were decolonized

much earlier. It is not without taking this historical situation into consideration that

Jameson speaks about postmodernism and "the coming into being of a global culture,"

and "the central phenomenon of cultural imperiaiism." He has no doubt that "it is global

capitalism which is responsible for the unification of global culture" (1987d: 23-4). This

"neoimperial domination," Perry Anderson says, i s no longer based on military force but

on "forms of ideological consent" (1999: 120). Based on these arguments objections to

Jarneson's theory of a global dominance of postmodemism, like the one raised by Aijaz

Ahmad can be dismissed. He says that "in India there is no postmodernism. The truth is

that there is not even modernity." He points out that in India where even the minimum

conditions of modernity have not been fulfilled, where modernization itself is still only a

distant possibility thew is no sense in speaking about postmodmisrn (1996: 18). But

Jarneson never argues that late capitalism has created a homogeneous situation where we

have the same socioeconomic conditions all over the world. Rather, he has consistently

emphasized the lopsided development of capital and has insisted that this unevenness is

inherent to the system. And, it is precisely to highlight this that he uses the concept of

"modes of production." In the contemporary world where l iberali~ation and deregulation

have opened the markets for capitalist penetration, and, telecammunications systems and

media have facilitated incredibly greater degree of cultural penetration, the impact of

capital i s more on the Third World than on the advanced societies. There is no need to say

that this impact is absolutely negative on the huge majority of the people there. This is

precisely the reason why Jameson calls for the development of genuine class

consciousness and collective resistance against the forces of the global hegemony of the

postmodern.