[ PMLA

T  M

On Always Historicizing: The Dialectic of Utopia

and Ideology Today

 . , .

“Always historicize!” The two-word sentence appearing at the begin-

ning of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act has taken on an almost talismanic quality for
many readers, evoking the insights to be found within the book in
such a way as to obviate the need to read it. Undoubtedly, thousands
of scholars recognize the famous “first line” without having read
The Political Unconscious, much like people who recognize the first
four or eight notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony without listening
any further. The fundamental paradox of the phrase has been fre-
quently cited by Jameson’s detractors, as if Jameson himself did not
know that the word always denotes a transhistorical imperative, and
as if he himself does not mention this fact in the very next sentence,
while also noting without ostensible irony that the phrase “always his-
toricize” would turn out to be the moral of the book. (The irony
becomes increasingly apparent as one reads on and realizes that a
key part of Jameson’s argument entails the injunction to eschew mor-
als entirely.) The exaggerated significance given to this slogan by
Jameson’s critics is also notable when compared to the relative lack
of emphasis accorded to his conclusion, where one might expect
the key takeaway of The Political Unconscious to be ultimately found.
The hortatory phrase “Always historicize!” appears in the preface
to The Political Unconscious, not in the main body of the text, and one
could argue that it is thus not the actual beginning of the book. Given
that a preface is usually understood to be a sort of hors d’oeuvre, apart
ROBERT T. TALLY, JR., is professor of
English at Texas State University. His
from and prior to the main body of a work, it is especially odd to see a
most recent book is For a Ruthless Critique line from its text given as much attention as it has. For example, the
of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of first line of chapter 1, “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially
Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2022). Symbolic Act,” is less pithy, but it certainly lets the reader know
©  The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern
Language Association of America
 PMLA . (), doi:./S

https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922000426 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 · ] Robert T. Tally, Jr. 

what to expect from The Political Unconscious: “This own version of a dialectical reversal of this idea, pro-
book will argue the priority of the political interpre- posing “to argue the proposition that the effectively
tation of literary texts” (17), which the book most ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily
certainly does. Utopian” (Political Unconscious 286). Jameson
Jameson’s conclusion, chapter 6 of The Political takes up the idea of a “positive hermeneutic”
Unconscious, probably deserves greater attention. If (which he places in scare quotes) within Marxism,
the preface, as a genre, tends to have a privileged which had been accused of a sort of strictly “nega-
position even when it is considered outside the tive” approach to interpretation, but Jameson will
work, the conclusion as a genre would seem more also show how the distinction itself does not hold
likely to be authoritative. After all, it is generally up well. The dialectic of utopia and ideology, more
considered not only a part of the main body of the subtle and more powerful than the binary of positive
text but the crucial final moment, the denouement versus negative (itself rooted in the traditional oppo-
if not the climax, in which the final meaning of sition of “good” and “evil”), preserves, transcends,
the text might be revealed. That’s not exactly how and cancels these moralizing concepts in showing
it works in Jameson’s book, of course. For instance, that both are inadequate for understanding our sit-
Ian Buchanan has noted that the definition of the uation. Moreover, they tend to ignore a fundamental
term “political unconscious” is not so much to be situatedness that affects everything about the way in
found within the book as to be slowly revealed which we make sense of the world through narrative
throughout the course of its pages: “The Political art and through our interpretation of it.
Unconscious taken as a whole, is the definition of In an interview in which he reaffirmed his
this concept—a very precise definition, to be sure, indebtedness to a sort of Sartrean existentialism,
encompassing a panoply of nuances and permuta- Jameson asserts that a crucial aspect of dialectical
tions, but containing nothing inessential or extrane- thought entails “an emphasis on the logic of the
ous” (233). The fact that Jameson gives his chapter 6 situation, rather than the logic of the individual
the title “Conclusion: The Dialectic of Utopia and consciousness or reified substances like society”
Ideology,” rather than set aside a separate conclu- (“Interview” 194). He goes on to say that “[t]he
sion without a chapter number, may indicate his emphasis on the logic of the situation, the constant
desire to keep it together with the main text. In changeability of the situation, its primacy and the
any case, this chapter effectively concludes the argu- way in which it allows certain things to be possible
ment about “the priority of the political interpreta- and others not: that would lead to a kind of thinking
tion of literary texts,” and it remains—like the book I would call dialectical” (194). The logic of the situa-
as a whole—a rich reservoir for critics today. tion helps explicate the paradox of a slogan like
Here Jameson expands and refines the Marxist “always historicize,” for it reveals the ways in
project of ideology critique by noting that even the which the subject is conditioned by the situation
most reactionary or conservative politics maintains in which it is located, a situation and a situatedness
a utopian kernel that cannot be ignored by a prop- that are implacably historical (and geographic), but
erly dialectical criticism. It opens with an epigraph from which the subject is also actively perceiving
taken from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the and interpreting the world. Along those lines, dia-
Philosophy of History,” specifically the passage lectical thinking tries to get at the multiple temporal
with the famous observation that “[t]here has frames of reference—our own biological span, a his-
never been a document of culture which was not torical epoch, a geological age, and so forth—in
at the same time a document of barbarism” which both the subject who interprets and the object
(Benjamin 256), thus introducing a fundamental to be interpreted are also situated. What Jameson
contradiction at the heart of Marxist analysis of cul- has called “metacommentary,” “national allegory,”
ture (that is, the copresence of the positive and the “cognitive mapping,” “the desire called Marx,” and
negative). But in this section Jameson invokes his a “desire for narrative” is the principal means by

https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922000426 Published online by Cambridge University Press

  On Always Historicizing: The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology Today [ P M L A

which we variously make sense of our situation. The For those critics who have bemoaned the
phrase “always historicize” itself becomes another predominance of the “hermeneutics of suspicion”
name by which to characterize this impulse. The in literary and cultural studies, The Political
Political Unconscious is, in part, a book-length Unconscious has become a particularly dark bête
attempt to show how this dialectic works. noire.1 Paul Ricoeur is almost always cited as the
In view of this detail, I think that to characterize originator of the phrase “hermeneutics of suspi-
the dialectical critic as “suspicious” seems wrong- cion,” but his work on the subject is rarely taken
headed, for it is a matter less of assuming that seriously beyond that point. He contrasts a herme-
some sort of truth is hidden (perhaps nefariously) neutics of faith, in which the reader seeks to reveal
than of recognizing the degree to which any truth hidden truths in the text, with that of suspicion, in
cannot be ascertained in itself but is always mediated which the reader seeks to show how the text hides
and conditioned by the situations in which it could the truth. But in Ricoeur’s own estimation, both
be encountered. If critics following the Jamesonian modes can and do operate at the same time. He ima-
practice are truly suspicious, it is not so much that gines this “suspicious” form of interpretation to be
they cast doubt on the text’s own apparently super- intimately, and perhaps necessarily, connected to
ficial meaning as that they would look askance at the the more “faithful” approach. In a line quoted
certainty with which the surface readers stake their directly by Jameson in The Political Unconscious
claim to the truth. This is also why Jameson has, (284), Ricoeur affirms that “[h]ermeneutics seems
throughout his career, remained skeptical of and to me to be animated by this double motivation:
opposed to judgments based on ethical or moral willingness to suspect, willingness to listen: vow to
claims, for the situation from and in which such rigor, vow to obedience. In our time we have not fin-
judgments are leveled is itself subject to constant ished doing away with idols and we have barely
change. As early as Marxism and Form (1971), begun to listen to symbols” (27). In observing this
Jameson wrote that distinction, Ricoeur infamously refuses to take
sides, understanding that interpretation itself—we
[t]he basic story which the dialectic has to tell is no recall that the original title of his 1965 book was sim-
doubt that of the dialectical reversal, that paradoxical ply De l’interprétation, after all—involves both moti-
turning around of a phenomenon into its opposite. . . . vations at once, even if certain interpreters, such as
It can be described as a kind of leap-frogging affair in the “masters of suspicion” Marx, Nietzsche, and
time, in which the drawbacks of a given historical sit-
Freud, emphasize suspicion rather than faith.
uation turn out in reality to be its secret advantages, in
The Political Unconscious, with its obvious
which what looked like built-in superiorities suddenly
prove to set the most ironclad limits on its future invocation of Marx and Freud, along with its clearly
development. It is a matter, indeed, of the reversal Nietzschean commitments to thinking “beyond good
of limits, of the transformation from negative to pos- and evil,” thus serves as a sort of apotheosis for this
itive and from positive to negative. (309) “school of suspicion” in contemporary literary criti-
cism and theory. Jameson’s book has unsurprisingly
A change in situation is at once a profoundly signif- featured prominently in what have been called “the
icant modification of the subject’s own position and method wars” in twenty-first-century literary criticism
perspective and a noticeable alteration in the objec- (see Anker and Felski 15–17). Related to but extending
tive conditions for the possibility of such experience. beyond the antagonism between formalism and his-
Adherence to a sort of “surface reading” almost toricism, which is itself part of the legacy of philology
always presupposed a kind of transcendent subject as a foundational discourse in literary studies (see, e.g.,
along with a rather fixed object, thus denying to Said), these method wars pit a hegemonic form of cri-
both their situatedness in time and space. To be crit- tique, whose “methodological orientation” (Anker
ical, in this regard, is to reckon with the logic of the and Felski 15) involves “a persistent concern with
situation. drawing out shadowy, concealed, or counterintuitive

https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922000426 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 · ] Robert T. Tally, Jr. 

meanings” (15–16) against an self-imagined insur- demystifying vocation to unmask and to demon-
gency of critics who “have questioned the value of strate the ways in which a cultural artifact fulfills a
reducing art to its political utility or philosophical specific ideological mission, in legitimating a given
premises,” presumably being thus better able to power structure, in perpetuating and reproducing
focus on and to appreciate “the formal qualities of the latter, and in generating specific forms of false
consciousness (or ideology in the narrower sense).
art and the sensual dimensions of aesthetic experi-
It must not cease to practice this essentially negative
ence” (16). That this formulation of opposing sides
hermeneutic function . . . but must also seek,
clearly favors the one over the other is not through and beyond this demonstration of the
accidental, and as Bruce Robbins observed of some instrumental function of a given cultural object, to
of the more prominent “postcritical” texts, by estab- project its simultaneously Utopian power as the sym-
lishing the enemy as old or old-fashioned, passé, bolic affirmation of a specific historical and class
out-of-touch but also somehow “dominant,” the rhe- form of collective unity. This is a unified perspective
toric “assumes that which it would seem obliged to and not the juxtaposition of two options or analytic
establish” (373). After all, who would openly support alternatives: neither is satisfactory in itself. (291)
reducing art to anything, whether it is “political util-
ity” or any other imaginary nadir? Such critics fail to A few pages later, Jameson repeats this positive her-
see, as Jameson himself put it elsewhere, that attend- meneutic as a concluding remark about Marxist
ing to ways in which a literary text’s “political, psy- hermeneutics in general, noting that if the terms
choanalytic, ideological, philosophical, or social “ideology” and “Utopia” don’t float your boat,
resonances might become audible (and describable) then this could be rephrased: “a functional method
within that experience of literary language and aes- for describing cultural texts is articulated with an
thetic form to which I remain committed” quite obvi- anticipatory one” (296). In any case, both the
ously involves an enlargement of the literary text! As “negative” and the “positive” versions of the herme-
Jameson notes, “The stereotypical characterization of neutic “must . . . be exercised simultaneously” (296).
such enlargement as reductive remains a never- Notwithstanding the perseverance of critiques
ending source of hilarity” (Introduction xxvii). The of his purported support for various embodiments
anti-interpretative and antitheory sentiments of of the hermeneutics of suspicion, paranoid reading,
those on the other side in the method wars facilitated and symptomatic criticism, Jameson has main-
the characterization of Jameson’s symptomatic read- tained this fundamental position throughout his
ing as “paranoid” or worse, and the moralizing sense career. This is evident in nearly all his work, includ-
that theirs was the side of virtue, saving literature and ing his most recent book (as of this writing), The
the humanities from these dark forces of “critique,” Benjamin Files (2020), in the final pages of which
animates the rhetoric of, along with what there is of he takes up once again that same essay, “Theses on
the argument for, postcritical reading. the Philosophy of History,” that had provided the
Jameson himself has never imagined his own epigraph for The Political Unconscious’s own final
critical project in the way it sometimes gets charac- chapter. Taking aim at the notorious vision of
terized, and in fact he has consistently emphasized Benjamin’s famous “Angel of History,” Jameson
the degree to which any symptomatic reading of a again finds that, for all the apparent “negativity” of
text must pay attention not only to the ideological its vision of historical violence and catastrophe, it
elements that may seem to conceal hidden truths nevertheless contains in it that “affirmation that
but also to the utopian elements that the text figures hope exists” (247)—that is, a fundamentally utopian
forth.2 As he puts it definitively in The Political element.
Unconscious, Jameson insists on adopting This dialectic of utopia and ideology thus turns
out to inform The Political Unconscious’s famous
an enlarged perspective for any Marxist analysis of slogan “Always historicize!” as well. One can see
culture, which can no longer be content with its that the profoundly formalist approaches that have

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  On Always Historicizing: The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology Today [ P M L A

been criticized by more historically oriented critics to imagine the end of the world than the end of cap-
as ideological, precisely because of their denial of italism, itself a reference to a comment made by
historical specificity or promotion of transhistorical Jameson as early as 1994 in The Seeds of Time
“values” (e.g., organic unity, types of ambiguity, [xii]), we inhabit a moment and a site where the uto-
différance, and so on), themselves embody a utopian pian dimension is all the more relevant and
dimension or impulse in which these yearnings to desirable.
escape from history—“History is what hurts,” after And thus, we might say, the “moral” of The
all (102)—find their form. And, on the flip side, Political Unconscious can serve as a crucial manifes-
the ideological straitjackets or enclosures attributed tation of the dialectic of utopia and ideology today,
to the historicist model by its critics, who dispute for to “always historicize” is also to recognize always
the proposition that a given situation in a historical our collective situatedness in this realm of necessity
moment would absolutely determine the signifi- understood as history and, at the same time, to
cance of a text, are themselves revealed to include imagine alternatives. The Political Unconscious, so
a utopian dimension as well, as the collective situat- timely in its first appearance forty years ago, turns
edness in a given spatiotemporal matrix figures out to be just as critical to our current moment,
forth its own sort of existential moment of freedom: for it is clear that we must be able to interpret the
to wit, in the words of the Marxist theorist and rev- world in order to have any hopes of changing it
olutionary Victor Serge, “the only meaning of life for the better.
lies in conscious participation in the making of his-
tory” (439). The famous exordium of The Political
Unconscious’s preface ably sets the stage for the
lengthy discussion to follow, reaching its crescendo
in the final chapter.
NOTES
The dialectic of utopia and ideology, as Jameson 1. Among the most famous examples, see Sedgwick; Best and
Marcus; and Felski.
imagines it, renders obsolete the primary antago-
2. Felski does acknowledge this “positive hermeneutic” in
nisms of the so-called method wars in advance, Jameson, only to then assert that “utopian thought . . . simply con-
Aufhebung-ing (sorry!) the whole positive versus stitutes the other face of critique” by reinforcing the “endemic sus-
negative contradiction, as well as form versus con- picion of the present,” before dismissing Jameson’s revelation of
tent, surface versus depth, affective versus critical, “the romantic-imaginative yearnings” of the works of art discussed
in The Political Unconscious as one of “the tenets of Marxist
reparative versus paranoid, and other such opposi- thought” (64).
tional pairings, and thereby moving the arguments
to a different level of consideration in which all
these, and more, are considered in relation to a WORKS CITED
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 · ] Robert T. Tally, Jr. 

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