Authors don't always know the meaning or usefulness of their work for other people. Meanwhile, a public whose interest has been aroused by the work is often disappointed to find out what the author originally intended by it. At any rate, although by this time it is certainly more helpful for me to find out what other people saw in The Political Unconscious than to explain what I originally meant to do in it, I will begin with this last as a matter of historical record. Then I will comment briefly on some of the themes touched on by these papers: mediation, totality, time, the unity of history, romance, genre, and finally collectivity. And I will conclude by telling you how I myself would want to use this book today.
Now I was writing these chapters in a period of great effervescence and development both in Marxism and in psychoanalysis—it would be enough to mention the names of Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser to evoke that moment. But although there was much cross-relationship between them, particularly in France, there did not seem to be any systematic attempt to theorize that relationship, and, particularly in this country, there did not exist much in the way of a discussion of their literary or cultural consequences.
So what interested me was not only a new and more complex view of both these currents of thought but also their realignment: not just another Freudo-Marxism but the harnessing of those two bodies of thought to practical literary criticism. In a way, I was attempting to spell out a concept invented by my old friend and antagonist Jean-François Lyotard with his slogan of libidinal economy: the idea that both Freudianism and Marxism were drives, and that the political was as libidinal as the other kind, and that its investment in the work demanded an attention at least equal to that traditionally accorded to the other shall we say more respectable impulses. The political, in my view then and now, is the heightened excitement awakened by the intersection of individual experience with the presence of the collective. So The Political Unconscious was designed to demonstrate that the life and value of a text lay in the hidden kindling of a collective spark in its representations. And that representation was as it were the sail that has to be set to catch the winds of collectivity. I called this History, and I still would; although many changes in our current situation today might demand a somewhat different formulation, which I'll come to later on.
As for the themes of the commentaries, I turn to mediation first, because The Political Unconscious was also a confrontation with the one model of Marxist literary criticism that had a certain influence in that period—namely, the work of Lucien Goldmann. His Le dieu caché (The Hidden God) of 1955 offered a historical-materialist study of Jansenism, and in particular of Pascal and Racine, which could scarcely be overlooked. The study was pathbreaking insofar as Goldmann took as his category of analysis not class but a class fraction; and he linked the Jansenist “structure of feeling” (a concept of Raymond Williams's from much the same period) to the failure of this class fraction to achieve social dominance. He called this structure of feeling tragic, and probably had existentialism in mind as a contemporary version of a similar situation; but today we might also perhaps want to understand his work as an anticipation of the role of melancholy in affect theory.
Goldmann's studies of modern literature were to my mind less convincing, but what I felt to be above all deeply unsatisfying was his conception of mediation as analogy, namely the parallelism between forms in social realities, or to put it more bluntly, base and superstructure. I hasten to say that it was not that distinction that bothered me, but rather the mediation between them that he offered, the method of a simple isomorphism between such very different kinds of realities. Meanwhile, all this was happening in a period in which any number of Freudo-Marxisms were being launched; and while Goldmann, like many Marxists of his generation, had very little interest in Freud, it did seem to me that most of these efforts were equally conceived around homologies, or simple parallelisms, between Freudian and Marxist drives. Homologies remain a useful pedagogical method, but I have to say that for their most productive use, I would tend to recommend not Goldmann but Oswald Spengler, with his notions of a baroque religion, a baroque architecture and painting, a baroque statecraft, a baroque mathematics, and so on. I've already indicated that Lyotard's libidinal apparatuses seemed to be a far more suggestive approach to this problem: not parallel forms, but investments in a formal apparatus, about which I would add that it has its own content (an idea we got from the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev with his notions of the form of a content and the content of a form). So much, then, for mediation.
Let me now say something about time and history. Is history a “linear fiction” within which we can identify a few synchronous moments that are still somehow present to us? Clearly the great structuralist issue of diachrony and synchrony is still with us, still a dilemma; but this was also a burning issue for Walter Benjamin, and I talk about it at some length in my new book, The Benjamin Files. If for the term linear fiction we substituted narrative, or narrative construction, perhaps the accusation would not sound so bad. But certainly my assertion about the unity of all history still sounds rather extravagant. I would remind us, however, that Marx was a Darwinist; and that the principle of all history surely remains survival (or self-preservation), whether at the personal or the collective level; Spinoza would have agreed. It gets even more complicated and interesting if you remember that the mode of production called capitalism cannot survive without expanding; it lives by way of an inner imperialist drive—geographic and ecological as well as economic, and maybe cultural too. So globalization is a dilemma as well as an opportunity; and the plague, the pandemic, is also an allegory of expansion—that other triumphantly expansionist and imperialist species—the rat—having now been replaced by the tourist.
As for the problem of time that accompanied this notion of history, my later emphasis on space in postmodernity is not yet visible in this book, I think; but the book nonetheless proposed a broader range of cultural times and temporalities throughout the diachronic, each mode of production, as Althusser put it, secreting its own specific mode of temporality. That is philosophically too complicated to begin to thrash out here. But on the matter of a unified history, what I would like to conclude with is Jean-Paul Sartre's observation that there were once many histories, and it is only in our own period that there is coming to be one alone, the history of capitalism.
These have all, however, been totalizing positions and propositions, so it is right for us to pass on to the theme of totality, which The Political Unconscious undoubtedly raises and which has been touched on in these commentaries. I don't know whether this is still the burning theoretical and ideological issue it used to be when this book was first published. If not, I think you have to use your imagination to grasp the rift and antagonism the idea of totality staged between its enemies and its adherents, a little like the violent clashes between Protestants and Catholics in the Northern Ireland Troubles. Perhaps it was an anticipation of what may today be characterized as an antagonism between Marxists and anarchists, it now being understood on both sides that the anarchists have won, but that in the meantime everyone also agrees on the idea of totality, namely that capitalism is everywhere and has no natural enemies.
At any rate, here is a theoretical terrain that was immediately political. I guess I would try to characterize the idea of totality as one of the authority of total knowledge, so that its adversaries were essentially antiauthoritarian (an important theme in the 1960s and 1970s during the war in Vietnam). There was the fear that totality would blot out all the individualities, and in that sense, as some right-wing half-wit once said to me, totality simply meant totalitarianism. There is no such thing as society, Margaret Thatcher famously said, ranging herself decisively among the enemies of totalization in the same spirit in which a critic of mine once proved that I was an imperialist because I used the term imperialism. There was certainly a deep fear of the party here, one that today still hampers our conceptions of collective politics. But perhaps there was also a fierce commitment to the autonomy of the work of art, which resisted any efforts to place it in the larger contexts of history, society, or culture. Hegel was also a bad name in this period, and the dialectic a well-nigh sinister and Orwellian process. But today Hegelians proclaim the end of history and it is totalizing thinkers who celebrate singularities.
So the debate on totality—or perhaps someone should rather evoke Lyotard's battle cry, “Let us wage war on totality” (82)—was a historical one that deserves analysis in its own right. I now think there was a basic misunderstanding at work—namely, that this abhorrent term was not, for its adherents, to be taken positively, as the name for a value, but rather negatively, as a critical instrument. Georg Lukács's foundational expression, in History and Class Consciousness, evoked an “aspiration towards totality” (198; see 175) and not its totalitarian realization. Lukács understood the resistance to totality, then, to designate what in The Political Unconscious I called strategies of containment—that is, the systematic (and sometimes unconscious) efforts to block off parts of reality we do not wish to see or know; to live in a sheltered world in which they do not exist; to ignore them and live in splendid and guilt-free isolation. This is clearly still very much an issue in American social life today, where the privileged want not to know about the lives of other social groups, and would much prefer that these known unknowns become unknown unknowns. Perhaps this is true of American empire generally, with that blindness of the center that characterizes all empires and prefers to ignore the radically different conditions of other places and other lives, to secede from them and, if absolutely necessary, to blot them out of existence.
In literature, I think the universal use of the English language actually has some such effect; so we pass on to the question of globalization and of non-Western culture that is scarcely raised in The Political Unconscious, except perhaps for a passage in which I use Conrad to pinpoint the source of our hostility to Islam. I certainly think that, even when we are not consciously thinking about other countries and the world population, this unpresent invisible framework conditions our personal and political ideologies; just as the status of the nation in the world system unconsciously orients the conscious concerns of its citizens and writers or artists. I like to paraphrase a remark of Peter Sloterdijk—namely, that today “people are not prepared to coexist consciously with a billion other subjects.”Footnote 1
For Marxism, however, globalization represents the stage Marx called “the world market,” and he grasps it as the closed frontier, the moment that capitalism approaches an absolute limit and thereby confronts its terminal contradictions.
But what, to turn to a final theme, does this totalizing position allow us to say or even to understand about the past? This is, I think, the sense of the question about medieval romance and the larger issue of literary genres. Is the past a Ding-an-sich we can only apprehend by way of our modern categories? Or on the contrary does modernity or postmodernity represent an enlargement of our capacities to know what is radically other and alien?
I'm happy to endorse Northrop Frye as a dialectician and to insist on the constitutive role of oppositions in thinking and interpretation. The fact that we cannot analyze precapitalist cultures in the same terms we use for capitalism should not prevent us from identifying analogous oppositions in texts like those of romance, where we can read the wish-fulfilling stories of the fairy tale as peasant narratives in stark class antagonism to the death-laden heroic epics of their feudal landlords.
As for genre, it is an even more complicated issue. I follow Lukacs's Theory of the Novel in its basic insight—namely, that the novel is not a genre but follows the disintegration of the various precapitalist generic traditions. I would simply add that something like larval genres always tend to re-form and to reemerge inside the formless novel as story types that must then in their turn be destroyed as they harden over into stereotypes and clichés. Realism, then, as the incessant destruction of earlier realisms, is always a kind of modernism.
But I should press on to my conclusion, which promised to offer my current views on what I would hope The Political Unconscious might lead to in the way of new work and new problems. I've already used the word collectivity several times here; and it is around this issue, rather than the word itself, that I would like to reorient the themes raised by this book: for the first point I want to make is that we have no adequate word for collectivity; all are ideologically slanted. The second point is that no form of collectivity is natural or organic; all, including the family itself, are constructed and indeed, if you want to go that far, nothing is really natural (although many concepts still claim to be and this is the heart of the philosophical debate around postmodern constructivism). I should add that class has never been thought to be a natural category; so that where a pseudonatural idea like race can only confront the idea of another race, the idea of class knows a genuine negation, namely the classless.
I also would like to insist that whatever way we choose to think about collectivity—past, present, or future—it will be incommensurable with our thoughts about biological, personal, and psychoanalytic individuality. This is why we cannot simply affirm homologies or parallelisms between these two domains, in both of which we participate.
I therefore see our unconscious, political or otherwise, as a matter of deeper categories, to use Kant's useful term—underlying categories that shape our conscious thoughts and interpretations of groups, the self, and indeed art or literature. What I would propose The Political Unconscious to affirm today is that the political and the aesthetic are not the same but that both confront in their different ways the representational contradictions inherent in the more abstract categories they share, which pose problems in political organization analogous to those posed in narrative (and probably also in questions of personal identity). So we still need to maintain the close affinity of politics, art, and consciousness; but to assert that affinity by way of the exploration of the deeper categories in which they all share or partake (to use Plato's formula). It is those categories that, I would want to say today, make up a true political unconscious.
