On the death of cultural theorist Fredric Jameson

Was what he wrote in his more than 30 books actually philosophy? Was it literary studies? Or was it, to use a term that is not well known in academic circles, theory? In other words, it was a way of thinking that meandered along its own path without any systematic backing. Fredric Jameson himself paid little attention to such distinctions. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1934, he considered himself a child of the 1950s.

He had devoured Marcel Proust and James Joyce, discovered in Ezra Pound a poet who fearlessly poached in foreign cultures such as China, and he had read William Faulkner’s novels with bated breath. But after his first years of study in America, he felt attracted to Europe, where he first got to know France and then Germany, two cultural Dioscuri, between which he was as unwilling to choose as between philosophy and literature.

What fascinated him about Jean-Paul Sartre, on whom he later wrote his doctorate under the exiled Erich Auerbach at Yale University, was the inseparability of aesthetics and politics. What fascinated him about Theodor W. Adorno, whom he had come across through reading Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”, in which the philosopher had participated in the background as a music expert, was his dialectical thinking, which he did not see as an irreconcilable contrast to the structuralism emerging on the left bank of the Rhine and the subsequent french theory could understand.

Without revolutionary hope

The link was a Marxism that he found in Sartre and Adorno and adopted as something that served him as an analytical tool, not as a revolutionary hope backed by the philosophy of history. Jameson saw culture and economy as inseparably linked in the interests of global power structures. This assumption is also the basis of his most famous book, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1991), which has not yet been translated into German.

Originating from an essay published four years earlier in the New Left Review, his approach differs both from the blind affirmation of the mishmash of styles that arbitrarily combined aesthetic traditions and that initially characterized architecture, and from the desperate defensive battles of a left-wing university philosophy that feared for its hegemonic power.

Jameson describes postmodernism as the intellectual “superstructure” of a late capitalism that builds its temples and palaces with the consent of the masses. From the headquarters of multinational corporations to large hotels that bring Las Vegas to every corner of the world, he sees a language at work, which he examines using the example of John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, among others.

Jameson was intent on describing a totality in which the totalitarian nature of this form of society is revealed. In conversations and lectures he did this with eloquent charm: not only the students he most recently found at Duke University in North Carolina were ensnared by his calm, wide-awake charisma. The expansive, convoluted nature of his books, which repeatedly address the relationship between modernity and postmodernity, makes it far more difficult for his readers to follow the astonishing range of his subjects and interests, and not only because of the complexity of his thoughts.

From expected kindred spirits such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to the modern fascist Wyndham Lewis and Raymond Chandler’s crime novels to the science fiction universes of Philip K. Dick, cyberpunk pope William Gibson and Ursula LeGuin, nothing was foreign to him. Last Sunday, Jameson, who despite his closeness to German culture never achieved the importance he was given internationally, died at the age of 90 in his home in Killingworth, Connecticut.