Jameson’s political unconscious is compatible with modernism-as-political-indifference

Evidence

It might be objected to this view of Modernism that it ignores the often unacknowledged or at least concealed and allusive presence of politics in Modernist texts: thus Colin MacCabe has shown the importance of the Irish Revolution for an understanding of Joyce’s writing. This is, I think, to miss the point. Frederic Jameson has argued for ‘the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts’, for integrating them into ‘the unity of a single great collective story’, the history of class struggle. ‘It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental text, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity.’ But the political, according to Jameson, is precisely unconscious, requiring a practice of interpretation to uncover it. It is quite consistent with Moretti’s thesis that Modernism’s primarily aesthetic relation to the wofld may be a distorted expression of ‘the repressed and buried reality’ of class struggle. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 215

Categorization

• XREF: This reframes Jameson’s own ‘political unconscious’ doctrine against him — a move that dovetails with the reader’s counter-reading of Jameson. Shows the dialectical maneuver of turning Jameson’s interpretive priority back on modernism’s ostensibly unpolitical surface.