A single intellectual text is multiply determined across origin, ideology, and place of filiation.

Evidence

What I mean by multiple determinations at work in any text of considerable complexity can be specified, I believe, by looking briefly at the problem of the cultural location of Jameson’s own text. This is, ostensibly, a First World text; Jameson is a US intellectual and identifies himself as such. But he is a US intellectual of a certain kind: not everyone is able to juxtapose Ousmane and De leuze so comfortably, so well; and he debunks the ‘global American culture of postmodernism’ which, he says, is the culture of his country. His theoretical framework, moreover, is Marxist, his political identification is socialistwhich would seem to place this text in the Second World. But the particular energy of his textits thematics, its relation with those other texts which give it its meaning, the very narrative upon which his ‘theory of cognitive aesthetics’ restsrakes him deep into the Third World, valorizing it, asserting it, filiating himself with it, as against the politically dominant and determinant of his own country. Where (in what world?) should 1, who do not believe in the Three Worlds Theory, place his text: in the First World of his origin, the Second World of his ideology and politics, or the Third World ofhis filiation and sympathy? — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 474

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete demonstration of ‘multiple determinations’ — origin, ideology, filiation — as lived method, not just slogan, useful for the reader’s own analytic toolkit.
• XREF: connects to: Any complex text is multiply determined across ideological worlds, not just one — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 205; Any text’s ideological conditions of production are always several, never singular — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 480; Complex literary texts are overdetermined and resist reduction to one factor — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 472

Broader Connections

• Any text’s ideological conditions of production are always several, never singular #corroborates (0.97) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 480
• Any complex text is multiply determined across ideological worlds, not just one #corroborates (0.92) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 205
• Complex literary texts are overdetermined and resist reduction to one factor #corroborates (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 472