Any complex text is multiply determined across ideological worlds, not just one

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 Deleuze 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 socialist – which would seem to place this text in the Second World. But the particular energy of his text – its thematics, its relation with those other texts which give it its meaning, the very narrative upon which his ‘theory of cognitive aesthetics’ rests – takes 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 I, 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 of his filiation and sympathy? — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 205

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely illustrates ‘multiple determinations’ as a critical method: a text’s origin, ideology, and sympathy can each locate it in a different world.
• XREF: connects to: Every text inevitably conveys meanings its author neither intended nor controlled. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 342; Complex literary texts are overdetermined and resist reduction to one factor — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 472; A single intellectual text is multiply determined across origin, ideology, and place of filiation. (+1 more)

Related

• A single intellectual text is multiply determined across origin, ideology, and place of filiation. (similarity 0.96)
• Any text’s ideological conditions of production are always several, never singular (similarity 0.91)
• Complex literary texts are overdetermined and resist reduction to one factor (similarity 0.85)
• The First World contains its own internal Third Worlds in its texts (similarity 0.81)
• Postmodern First World contains its own internal Third Worlds along gender and race lines (similarity 0.79)