Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture

Author(s): Fredric Jameson

Source: Social Text, No. 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 130-148
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/466409
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 Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture
FREDRIC JAMESON

The theory of mass culture--or mass audience culture, commercial cultur

culture, the culture industry, as it is variously known--has always tended to defi
against so-called high culture without reflecting on the objective status of this
As so often, positions in this field reduce themselves to two mirror-ima
essentially staged in terms of value. Thus the familiar motif of elitism argues for
of mass culture on the grounds of the sheer numbers of people exposed to it; th
high or hermetic culture is then stigmatized as a status hobby of small g
intellectuals. As its anti-intellectual thrust suggests, this essentially negative po
little theoretical content but clearly responds to a deeply rooted conviction
radicalism and articulates a widely based sense that high culture is an est
phenomenon, irredeemably tainted by its association with institutions, in partic
the university. The value invoked is therefore a social one: it would be pref
with tv programs, The Godfather, orJaws, rather than with Wallace Stevens or H
because the former clearly speak a cultural language meaningful to far wider st
population than what is socially represented by intellectuals. Radicals are h
intellectuals, so that this position has suspicious overtones of the guilt trip; me
overlooks the anti-social and critical, negative (although generally not re
stance of much of the most important forms of modem art; finally, it offers no
reading even those cultural objects it valorizes and has had little of interest
their content.
This position is then reversed in the theory of culture worked out by the Frankfurt
School; as is appropriate for this exact antithesis of the radical position, the work of Adomo,
Horkheimer, Marcuse, and others is an intensely theoretical one and provides a working
methodology for the close analysis of precisely those products of the culture industry
which it stigmatizes and which the radical view exalted. Briefly, this view can be
characterized as the extension and application of Marxist theories of commodity reification
to the works of mass culture. The theory of reification (here strongly overlaid with Max
Weber's analysis of rationalization) describes the way in which, under capitalism, the older
traditional forms of human activity are instrumentally reorganized and "taylorized,"
analytically fragmented and reconstructed according to various rational models of
efficiency, and essentially restructured along the lines of a differentiation between means
and ends. But this is a paradoxical idea: it cannot be properly appreciated until it is
understood to what degree the means/ends split effectively brackets or suspends ends
themselves, hence the strategic value of the Frankfurt School term "instrumentalization"
which usefully foregrounds the organization of the means themselves over against any
particular end or value which is assigned to their practice. In traditional activity, in other
words, the value of the activity is immanent to it, and qualitatively distinct from other ends

FREDRIC JAMESON teaches French at Yale University. His new book, Fables ofAggression: Wyndham Lewis, the
Modernist as Fascist, will be published by the University of California Press this spring.

130

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 Reification & Utopia 131
or values articulated in other for
kinds of work in such commun
instance, the familiar Aristotelia
poeisis (material, formal, efficien
to agriculture had or war which
divine--basis. It is only with th
Capital designates as the fundam
labor can be separated out from
activity (mining as opposed to
manufacture), and all universally
tive, that is, under the universal
the various forms of human a
effectively been bracketted or su
free to be ruthlessly reorganized
The force of the application of
definition of art by traditional
without an end," that is, as a g
purpose or end in the "real wo
generally. This traditional definit
that fall flat or home movies or
of mass and high culture alike
preoccupations just as complet
Wings of the Dove or hear a Be
At this point, however, the c
structural and historical differentiation into what was conceived as the universal
description of the aesthetic experience as such and in whatever form. The concept of t
commodity cuts across the phenomenon of reification--described above in terms of
activity or production-from a different angle, that of consumption. In a world in whi
everything, including labor power, has become a commodity, ends remain no le
undifferentiated than in the production schema-they are all rigorously quantified, a
have become abstractly comparable through the medium of money, their respective price
or wage-yet we can now phrase their instrumentalization, their reorganization along t
means/ends split, in a new way by saying that by its transformation into a commodity a
thing, of whatever type, has been reduced to a means for its own consumption. It no longe
has any qualitative value in itself, but only insofar as it can be "used": the various forms o
activity lose their immanent intrinsic satisfactions as activity and become means to an end
The objects of the commodity world of capitalism also shed their independent "being" and
intrinsic qualities and come to be so many instruments of commodity satisfaction: th
familiar example is that of tourism-the American tourist no longer lets the landscape "be i
its being" as Heidegger would have said, but takes a snapshot of it, thereby graphical
transforming space into its own material image. The concrete activity of looking a
landscape-including, no doubt, the disquieting bewilderment with the activity itself, t
anxiety that must arise when human beings, confronting the non-human, wonder what th
are doing there and what the point or purpose of such a confrontation might be in the fir
place-is thus comfortably replaced by the act of taking possession of it and converting
into a form of personal property. This is the meaning of the great scene in Godard's L
Carabiniers, when the new world conquerors exhibit their spoils: unlike Alexander, th

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 132 Jameson

merely own t
Coliseum, the p
sense of Guy D
ultimate form
image itself. W
of the other-d
ization of our o
for other peop
capable of the
It is clear that such an account of commodification has immediate relevance to
aesthetics, if only because it implies that everything in consumer society has taken on
aesthetic dimension. The force of the Adorno-Horkheimer analysis of the culture indu
however, lies in its demonstration of the unexpected and imperceptible introduc
commodity structure into the very form and content of the work of art itself. Yet th
something like the ultimate squaring of the circle, the triumph of instrumentalization
that "finality without an end" which is art itself, the steady conquest and colonization o
ultimate realm of non-practicality, of sheer play and anti-use, by the logic of the wor
means and ends. But how can the sheer materiality of a poetic sentence be "used"
sense? And while it is clear how we can buy the idea of an automobile or smoke for the
libidinal image of actors, writers, and models with cigarettes in their hands, it is muc
clear how a narrative could be "consumed" for the benefit of its own idea.
In its simplest form, this view of instrumentalized culture-and it is implicit in t
aesthetics of the Tel Quel group as well as in that of the Frankfurt School--suggests that t
reading process is itself restructured along a means/ends differentiation. It is instructive
here to juxtapose Auerbach's discussion of the Odyssey in Mimesis, and his description
the way in which at every point the poem is as it were vertical to itself, self-contained, e
verse paragraph and tableau somehow timeless and immanent, bereft of any necessary
indispensible links with what precedes it and what follows; in this light it becomes possibl
to appreciate the strangeness, the historical un-naturality (in a Brechtian sense) of
contemporary books which, like detective stories, you read "for the ending"--the bulk of
the pages becoming sheer devalued means to an end--in this case, the "solution"--which
itself utterly insignificant insofar as we are not thereby in the real world and by the latter
practical standards the identity of an imaginary murderer is supremely trivial.
The detective story is to be sure an extremely specialized form: still, the essentia
commodification of which it may serve as an emblem can be detected everywhere in t
sub-genres of contemporary commercial art, in the way in which the materialization of th
or that sector or zone of such forms comes to constitute an end and a consumption
satisfaction around which the rest of the work is then "degraded" to the status of sh
means. Thus, in the older adventure tale, not only does the denouement (victory of hero o
villains? discovery of the treasure, rescue of the heroine or the imprisoned comrades, foil
of a monstrous plot, or arrival in time to reveal an urgent message or a secret) stand as th
reified end in view of which the rest of the narrative is consumed, this reifying structure al
reaches down into the very page-by-page detail of the book's composition. Each chapt
recapitulates a smaller consumption process in its own right, ending with the frozen imag
of a new and catastrophic reversal of the situation, constructing the smaller gratifications
a flat character who actualizes his single potentiality (the "choleric" Ned Land fina
exploding in anger), organizing its sentences into paragraphs each of which is a sub-plot in

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 Reification & Utopia 133

its own right, or around the ob

tableau, the whole tempo of su
illustrations which, either befor
to transform the transparent f
objects we can consume.
Yet this is still a relatively pri
and more interesting is the w
produce a quasi-material "fee
intermittently realized by it: th
rhythms of the earth or of gr
so many commodities towar
means, their essential materiali
that accompanies their screen
consumable feeling tone is a
manifestation of the kind of "
about the way the contempor
sonata form itself becomes an
tune or melody.
It will be clear, then, that I c
structure of mass culture of th
way of looking at the same ph
exhausted. On the contrary,
such descriptions, let alone to
features besides commodity re
What is unsatisfactory about
apparatus, but rather the p
valorization of traditional mo
subversive, "autonomous" ae
Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dim
assessment of a Schoenberg's
been omitted from the later ju
historicity, and in particular, t
But if this is so, then the grea
Becke'tt, or even Brecht himse
which to measure the "degrad
undeveloped tendencies in rec
"new music" of the type of L
literary texts like those of P
mass cultures.
For all these reasons, it seems to me that we must rethink the opposition high
culture/mass culture in such a way that the emphasis on evaluation to which it has
traditionally given rise, and which-however the binary system of value operates (ma
culture is popular and thus more authentic than high culture, high culture is autonomous
and therefore utterly incomparable to a degraded mass culture)--tends to function in some
timeless realm of absolute aesthetic judgment, is replaced by a genuinely historical a
dialectical approach to these phenomena. Such an approach demands that we read high and
mass culture as objectively related and dialectically interdependent phenomena, as tw

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134 Jameson

and inseparable f
perspective, the
become-not the
objective contr
emergence of m
culture" to whi
tended loosely to
you see Greek t
type of Hugo, or
"popular" audien
problems as th
popular contem
Robert Frost, A
interesting sub
historical point o
dialectical opposi
the latter, which
other term woul
surely not cultu
essentially prec
But such specif
well: the comme
be assimilated to
dependent for
"organic" expres
village, the cour
was still a unifi
tendencial effect
atomize them i
individuals, by
system. Thus, t
marginalized co
within the capi
industrial mass c
older forms of p
Thus understood
modernism and
which promises
which have stra
(e.g., in the uni
emphasis must
of a public--sh
antithetical ways
adequately und
structural influ
omnipresence of
conceives its f

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 Reification & Utopia 135
commodity, to devise an aestheti
and resistant to instrumental
valorization of modernism by
designation of modernism as rea
rather than a new "solution" in i
terms of which alone modernis
solution-the conception of the
isolated individual, and the logic
and private religions--are contra
aesthetic project (Mallarme's id
formulation) an impossible one
not a judgment of value about
Yet there are other aspects of
remained unexplored and offer
and mass culture and their struc
of materialization in contempo
contemporary Marxist theory
academic formalism). Here the m
of the Hegelian tradition (Lukacs
reification-which furnishes the
celebration of the "material si
production" by the French tradi
If you are willing to entertain
increasingly materialized signif
and culturally--then this ideolo
misunderstanding. Once again,
problem of value (which fatally
positive and negative, essential
dialectical and historical situation
feature of both modernism and mass culture.
The task of defining this new area of study would then initially involve making
inventory of other such problematic themes or phenomena in terms of which the
interrelationship of mass culture and modernism can usefully be explored, something it is
too early to do here. At this point, I will merely note one further such theme, which has
seemed to me to be of the greatest significance in specifying the antithetical form
reactions of modernism and mass culture to their common social situation, and that is the
notion of repetition. This concept, which in its modem form we own to Kierkegaard,
known rich and interesting new elaborations in recent post-structuralism: for Jea
Baudrillard, for example, the repetitive structure of what he calls the simulacrum (that is
the reproduction of "copies" which have no original) characterizes the commodity
production of consumer capitalism and marks our object world with an unreality and a fre
floating absence of "the referent" (e.g., the place hitherto taken by nature, by raw materi
and primary production, or by the "originals" of artisanal production or handicraft) utter
unlike anything experienced in any earlier social formation.
If this is the case, then we would expect repetition to constitute yet another feature o
the contradictory situation of contemporary aesthetic production to which both modern-
ism and mass culture in one way or another cannot but react. This is in fact the case, and on

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136 Jameson

need only invok

from the Roman
of classical Ang
and novelty, th
increasing with t
style and fashi
breaks through
equivalence. Suc
one thing, they
the concrete con
history of form
yet they are use
been forced, in s
to the objective
of a "text" and t
modernist aesth
defy repetition n
but now within
from Gertrude S
own, can be seen
external irritant
over, "acted out
But th it is clear
Indeed, it has f
the various mo
forms of lyric,
the unclassifiab
culture. Paperb
distinctions bet
graphy, as do th
marketing of H
commercial film
production, and
or omnibus for
forms, howeve
become new "gen
and reproducti
But we must sp
signs of someth
homogeneous cla
status--which t
of the situation o
relationship betw
a concrete socia
With the comin
production vani
loses all social st

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Reification & Utopia 137
relationship to the public is
introuvable" (the appeals to
Gertrude Stein's remark, "I wr
this intolerable new state of af
The survival of genre in emer
the stability of the publics of
signals of mass culture are ver
tion and displacement of older
situation of repetition. The ato
thing over and over again, henc
if you doubt this, think of you
from the mystery shelf turns
exasperation of people in the r
were about to see a thriller or a
underway. Think also of the m
structural reason for the inabi
are either socially "realistic"
mere variation, has little enoug
certainly exacerbated by the
tempo of the production of ne
Even if you are a reader of Kaf
series, you do so in expectation
video narrative making "high
for film, where it has however
(now multinational) film--dete
films, which determine a shift
of high cultural discourse or so
This situation has important c
not yet been fully appreciate
Kierkegaard, Freud, and others
"a second time." The first-time
reconverted into repetition t
called "retroactivity" [Nachtrii
is no "first time" of repetiti
copies; and here too, modernism
like Hegel's Phenomenology o
modernism, the hermetic text
whose stable reality you can
effectively volatilizes the origi
of mass culture has no primary
The most striking demonstr
contemporary pop music of
western, or disco. I will argu
genres "for the first time";
different situations, from the
in the work place, or in sho
performances of the "work" in

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138 Jameson

and take home

a complicated c
The passionate
investment of a
of such attachm
the pop single,
our own lives,
Under these ci
"original" musi
Whatever the r
quite distinct,
culture, or in o
therefore lies i
nor is anything
medievalists w
ficially similar
anything expl
which seems t
presents us w
stable object of
unable to focus
of study in w
aesthetic pheno
of its poles, an
universe which
textual refere

The above ref

which confro
somewhat dif
Frankfurt Scho
"elitists" on th
sheer commer
who obviously
today. If this w
assimilated to
under the ana
however, in h
functions of cu
exception, of co
the hermetic
culture we h
considerations
epiphenomena
social life---th
when political

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 Reification & Utopia 139
the political, the ideological, and
this repression of the cultural m
ideologies of the various discip
cultural issues to that ghettoizin
"sociology of culture"--it is also
the most fundamental ideologi
"culture"-reduced to plays and
most trivial and non-serious acti
even the vocation of the esthete
the 1950s and of his successor, t
content and expressed (general
tion and the repudiation of the p
then, to be sure, as thoroughly r
work of the sociologists of m
accounting for the resistance a
anything which smacks of the
economic, the historical context-which it was the function of the aesthetic vocation to
deny or to mask out in the first place.
What we must ask the sociologists of manipulation, however, is whether they really
inhabit the same world we do. Speaking for at least a few, I will say that culture, far from
being an occasional matter of the reading of a monthly good book or a trip to the drive-in,
seems to me the very element of consumer society itself; no society has ever been saturated
with signs and messages like this one. If we follow Debord's argument about the
omnipresence and the omnipotence of the image in consumer capitalism today, then if
anything the priorities of the real become reversed, and everything is mediated by culture,
to the point where even the political and the ideological "levels" have initially to be
disentangled from their primary mode of representation which is cultural. Howard Jarvis,
Carter, even Castro, the Red Brigade, Vorster, the Communist "penetration" of Africa, the
war in Vietnam, strikes, inflation itself-all are images, all come before us with the
immediacy of cultural representations of which one can be fairly certain that they are by a
long shot not historical reality itself. If we want to go on believing in categories like social
class, then we are going to have to dig for them in the insubstantial bottomless realm of
cultural and collective fantasy. Even ideology has in our society lost its clarity as prejudice,
false consciousness, readily identifiable opinion: our racism gets all mixed up with clean-cut
black actors on tv and in commercials, our sexism has to make a detour through new
stereotypes of the "women's libber" on the network series. After that, if one wants to stress
the primacy of the political, so be it: until the omnipresence of culture in this society is even
dimly sensed, realistic conceptions of the nature and function of political praxis today can
scarcely be framed.
It is true that manipulation theory sometimes finds a special place in its scheme for those
rare cultural objects which can be said to have overt political and social content: thus, 60s
protest songs, The Salt of the Earth, Clancey Segal's novels or Sol Yurick's, chicano
murals, and the San Francisco Mime Troop. This is not the place to raise the complicated
problem of political art today, except to say that our business as culture critics requires us to
raise it, and to rethink what are still essentially 30s categories in some new and more
satisfactory contemporary way. But the problem of political art-and we have nothing
worth saying about it if we do not realize that it is a problem, rather than a choice or a ready-

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 140 Jameson

made option--s
the present ess
cultural creatio
the "organic" s
polis to the pea
embattled pre-
all cohesive so
problematizes
group life. The
into two modes
of these modes
to expect that
sheer talent, in
way, that living
experience it
aesthetics--th
nascent mass-
openly politic
utionary effi
innovation-we
our own time.

The only authentic cultural production today has seemed to be that which can draw
the collective experience of marginal pockets of the social life of the world system: b
literature and blues, British working-class rock, women's literature, gay literat
roman quebecois, the literature of the Third World; and this production is possible on
the degree to which these forms of collective life or collective solidarity have not ye
fully penetrated by the market and by the commodity system. This is not neces
negative prognosis, unless you believe in an increasingly windless and all-embraci
system; what shatters such a system-it has unquestionably been falling into p
around us since the development of industrial capitalism-is however very prec
collective praxis or, to pronounce its traditional and unmentionable name, class st
Yet the relationship between class struggle and cultural production is not an im
one; you do not reinvent an access onto political art and authentic cultural produc
studding your individual artistic discourse with class and political signals. Rathe
struggle, and the slow and intermittent development of genuine class consciousn
themselves the process whereby a new and organic group constitutes itself, wher
collective breaks through the reified atomization (Sartre calls it the seriality) of capit
social life. At that point, to say that the group exists and that it generates its own sp
cultural life and expression, are one and the same. This is, if you like, the third term m
from my initial picture of the fate of the aesthetic and the cultural under capitalism
useful purpose is served by speculation on the forms such a third and authentic
cultural language might take in situations which do not yet exist. As for the artists, fo
too "the owl of Minerva takes its flight at dusk," for them too, as with Lenin in April,
of historical inevitability is always after the fact, and they cannot be told any more th
rest of us what is historically possible until after it has been tried.
This said, we can now return to the question of mass culture and manipulat
Manipulation theory implies a psychology, but this is all very well and good: Brecht t

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Reification & Utopia 141
us that under the right circum
liked (Mann ist Mann), only he in
or more than on the techniques
concept, of manipulation can b
repression. The Freudian mechani
charged memory, guilty or threa
risks emerging into the subjec
minate, it has specific content, a
that content which expresses itse
displacement, substitution, or w
But of course the classical Fre
joke) was that of the symbolic fu
indirection whereby desire coul
a to be sure purely symbolic sati
however--Norman Holland's Th
more useful for our present prob
can possibly be said to "manipula
work of art must be described
incompatible features of aesth
function, but on the other the
against the frightening and pote
wish-material--be somehow har
structure. Hence Holland's sugg
manage this raw material of the
the concept of a management of
wish-fulfillment together within
in a kind of psychic compromi
content within careful symbo
intolerable, unrealizable, proper
can again be laid to rest.
This model seems to me to per
manipulation, diversion, degradat
the media. In particular it allows
false consciousness, but rather
and fantasies which must then
order subsequently to be "man
present essay suggest that such
though we will not here be able t
argue that both mass culture and
word, as the older social realisms
than in the latter. Both moderni
the fundamental social anxie
antinomies and fantasies of disas
tends to handle this material by
culture represses them by the na
projection of an optical illusion

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 142 Jameson

I will now dem

recent commer
readings I will propose are at least consistent with my earlier remarks about the
volatilization of the primary text in mass culture by repetition, to the degree of which they
are differential, "intertextually" comparative decodings of each of these filmic messages.
In the case ofJaws, however, the version or variant against which we will read the film is
not the shoddy and disappointing sequel, but rather the bestselling novel from which the
film--one of the most successful box office attractions in movie history-was adapted. We
will see that the adaptation involved significant changes in the original narrative; our
attention to such strategic alterations may indeed arouse some initial suspicion of the
official or "manifest" content preseryed in both these texts, and on which most of the
discussion ofJaws has tended to focus. Thus critics from Gore Vidal and Pravda all the way
to Stephen Heath have tended to emphasize the problem of the shark itself and what it
"represents": such speculation ranges from the psychoanalytic to historic anxieties about
the Other that menaces American society-whether it be the Communist conspiracy or the
Third World-and even to internal fears about the unreality of daily life in American today,
and in particular the haunting and unmentionable persistence of the organic--of birth,
copulation, and death-which the cellophane society of consumer capitalism desperately
recontains in hospitals and old age homes, and sanitizes by means of a whole strategy of
linguistic euphemisms which enlarge the older, purely sexual ones: on this view, the
Nantucket beaches "represent" consumer society itself, with its glossy and commodified
images of gratification, and its scandalous and fragile, ever suppressed, sense of its own
possible mortality. Now none of these readings can be said to be wrong or aberrant, but their
very multiplicity suggests that the vocation of the symbol--the killer shark-lies less in any
single message or meaning than in its very capacity to absorb and organize all of these quite
distinct anxieties together. As a symbolic vehicle, then, the shark must be understood in
terms of its essentially polysemous function rather than any particular content attributable
to it by this or that spectator. Yet it is precisely this polysemousness which is profoundly
ideological, insofar as it allows essentially social and historical anxieties to be folded back
into apparently "natural" ones, to be both expressed and recontained in what looks like a
conflict with other forms of biological existence.
Interpretive emphasis on the shark, indeed, tends to drive all these quite varied readings
in the direction of myth criticism, where the shark is naturally enough taken to be the most
recent embodiment of Leviathan, so that the struggle with it effortlessly folds back into one
of the fundamental paradigms or archetypes of Professor Frye's storehouse of myth. To
rewrite the film in these terms is thus to emphasize what I will shortly call its Utopian
dimension, that is, its ritual celebration of the renewal of the social order and its salvation,
not merely from divine wrath, but also from unworthy leadership.
But to put it this way is to begin to shift our attention from the shark itself to the
emergence of the hero-or heroes--whose mythic task it is to rid the civilized world of the
archetypal monster. This is, however, precisely the issue-the nature and the specification
of the "mythic" hero--about which the discrepancies between the film and the novel have
something instructive to tell us. For the novel involves an undisguised expression of class
conflict in the tension between the island cop and the high-society oceanographer, who
used to summer in Easthampton and ends up sleeping with Brody's wife: Hooper is indeed a
much more important figure in the novel than in the film, while by the same token the novel

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 Reification & Utopia 143
assigns Quint a very minor role
most dramatic surprise the nove
discovery that in the book Hoo
romantic fascination with death
how the American reading pu
resonance of this element of the
to be a more European motif--
of the islander and the yankee over the decadent playboy challenger-are surely
unmistakable, as is the systematic elimination and suppression of all such class overtones
from the film itself.
The latter therefore provides us with a striking illustration of a whole work of
displacement by which the written narrative of an essentially class fantasy has been
transformed, in the Hollywood product, into something quite different, which it now
remains to characterize. Gone is the whole decadent and aristocratic brooding over death,
along with the erotic rivalry in which class antagonisms were dramatized; the Hooper of the
film is nothing but a technocratic whiz-kid, no tragic hero but instead a good-natured
creature of grants and foundations and scientific know-how. But Brody has also undergone
an important modification: he is no longer the small-town island boy married to a girl from a
socially prominent summer family; rather, he has been transformed into a retired cop from
New York City, relocating on Nantucket in an effort to flee the hassle of urban crime, race
war, and ghettoization. The figure of Brody now therefore introduces overtones and
connotations of law-and-order, rather than of yankee shrewdness, and functions as a tv-
police-show hero transposed into this apparently more sheltered but in reality equally
contradictory milieu which is the great American summer vacation.
I will therefore suggest that in the film the socially resonant conflict between these two
characters has for some reason that remains to be formulated been transformed into a vision
of their ultimate partnership, and joint triumph over Leviathan. This is clearly the moment
to come to Quint, whose enlarged role in the film thereby becomes strategic. The myth-
critical option for reading this figure must at once be noted: it is indeed tempting to see
Quint as the end term of the three-fold figure of the ages of man into which the team of
shark-hunters is so obviously articulated, Hooper and Brody then standing as youth and
maturity over against Quint's authority as an elder. But such a reading leaves the basic
interpretive problem intact: what can be the allegorical meaning of a ritual in which the
elder figure follows the intertextual paradigm of Melville's Ahab to destruction while the
other two paddle back in triumph on the wreckage of his vessel? Or, to formulate it in
different way, why is the Ishmael survivor-figure split into the two survivors of the film (and
credited with the triumphant destruction of the monster in the bargain)?
Quint's determinations in the film seem to be of two kinds: first, unlike the
bureaucracies of law enforcement and science-&-technology (Brody and Hooper), but also
in distinction to the corrupt island Mayor with his tourist investments and big business
interests, Quint is defined as the locus of old-fashioned private enterprise, of the individual
entrepreneurship not merely of small business, but also of local business-hence the
insistence on his salty Down-East typicality. Meanwhile-but this feature is also a new
addition to the very schematic treatment of the figure of Quint in the novel-he also
strongly associates himself with a now distant American past by way of his otherwise
gratuitous reminiscences about World War II and the campaign in the Pacific. We are thus
authorized to read the death of Quint in the film as the two-fold symbolic destruction of an

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 144 Jameson

older America--
outmoded kind,
older America of
Now the conten
may be specified
law-and-order
which must be c
of the shark itse
more traditiona
consciousness a
operation may co
that case it is a U
social program.
them for its ne
populisms and t
strategy of legit
poor which pers
by substituting
without underst
Jaws is therefor
of the way in w
some initial expr
containment. In
more decisive an
to the ideologic
presence within
Frankfurt Schoo
degraded type
negative and cr
springs. At this
cannot be ideol
Utopian as well:
a fantasy bribe t
monstrous a ph
type, in "socialis
of the works of
social order un
expression; we w
consciousness, so that the works of mass culture, even if their function lies in the
legitimation of the existing order--or some worse one--cannot do their job without
deflecting in the latter's service the deepest and most fundamental hopes and fantasies of
the collectivity, to which they can therefore, no matter in how distorted a fashion, be found
to have given voice.
We therefore need a method capable of doing justice to both the ideological and the
Utopian or transcendent functions of mass culture simultaneously. Nothing less will do, as
the suppression of either of these terms may testify: we have already commented on the
sterility of the older kind of ideological analysis, which, ignoring the Utopian components of

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 Reification & Utopia 145
mass culture, ends up with the emp
degraded status. But it is equally o
would celebrate Utopian impulses
ideological vocation of mass culture-
most academic and aestheticizing an
the same time that it abstracts them from their concrete social and historical situation.
The two parts of The Godfather have seemed to me to offer a virtual textbook
illustration of these propositions; for one thing, recapitulating the whole generic tradition
of the gangster film, it reinvents a certain "myth" of the Mafia in such a way as to allow us t
see that ideology is not necessarily a matter of false consciousness, or of the incorrect o
distorted representation of historical "fact," but can rather be quite consistent with a
"realistic" faithfulness to the latter. To be sure, historical inaccuracy (as, e.g., when the 50s
are telescoped into the 60s and 70s in the narrative of Hoffa's career in FIS.T. ) can ofte
provide a suggestive lead towards ideological function: not because there is any scientifi
virtue in the facts themselves, but rather as a symptom of a resistance of the "logic of the
content," of the substance of historicity in question, to the narrative and ideologica
paradigm into which it has been thereby forcibly assimilated.
The Godfather, however, obviously works in and is a permutation of a generic
convention; one could write a history of the changing social and ideological functions o
this convention, showing how analogous motifs are called upon in distinct historical
situations to emit strategically distinct yet symbolically intelligible messages. Thus th
gangsters of the classical 30s films (Robinson, Cagney, etc.) were dramatized as
psychopaths, sick loners striking out against a society essentially made up of wholesom
people (the archetypal democratic "common man" of New Deal populism). The post-war
gangsters of the Bogart era remain loners in this sense but have unexpectedly become
invested with tragic pathos in such a way as to express the confusion of veterans returning
from World War II, struggling with the unsympathetic rigidity of institutions, and ultimatel
crushed by a petty and vindictive social order.
The Mafia material was drawn on and alluded to in these earlier versions of the gangster
paradigm, but did not emerge as such until the late 50s and the early 60s: this very
distinctive narrative content-a kind of saga or family material analogous to that of th
medieval chansons de geste, with its recurrent episodes and legendary figures returnin
again and again in different perspectives and contexts--can at once be structurally
differentiated from the older paradigms by its collective nature: in this, reflecting a
evolution towards organizational themes and team narratives which studies like Will
Wright's Sixguns and Society have shown to be significant developments in the other sub-
genres of mass culture (the western, the caper film, etc.) during the 60s.
Such an evolution, however, suggests a global transformation of post-war America
social life and a global transformation of the potential logic of its narrative content withou
yet specifying the ideological function of the Mafia paradigm itself. Yet this is surely not ver
difficult to identify. When indeed we reflect on an organized conspiracy against the public,
one which reaches into every comrner of our daily lives and our political structures t
exercise a wanton ecocidal and genocidal violence at the behest of distant decision-make
and in the name of an abstract conception of profit--surely it is not about the Mafia, but
rather about American business itself that we are thinking, American capitalism in its most
systematized and computerized, dehumanized, "multinational" and corporate form. Wh
kind of crime, said Brecht, is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? Ye

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146 Jameson

until recent year

and articulated
McCarthy era an
known an inexp
recently (white
shown signs of r
observe the inc
unenviable posit
anywhere in th
This is the cont
understood, as th
the rage generat
by the movie scr
the Mafia remain
and influence in
the Mafia narrat
in the United St
profit, but rath
whose ultimate m
political insight
strategically subs
rather than the
ethical judgmen
of the intent to
incorruptibility,
dently a very d
prescription wo
But if this is th
said to be their t
the fantasy mess
figure of collecti
synthesis like Th
the reference t
inflect them pow
fantasy materi
transformed nar
object of prejud
intermingled a
groups-already
the ethnic and
contempt at on
neighborhood so
older Gemeinsch
Thus, at a time
"explained" in t
growth of perm
to project an ima

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 Reification & Utopia 147
of the past. Thus the tightly knit
security of the (god-)father with
for a Utopian fantasy which can n
and stereotypes as the image of t
The drawing power of a mass
measured by its twin capacity to
that it provides the vehicle for th
doubly interesting from our pres
from the restrictions of the best
betrays the momentum and the o
like a free
unbound state. Go or
Macherey's in Towards a T thesis,
so much express ideology as, by
figuration, it ends up enacting th
It is as though the unconscious i
could in the sequel be observed to
or reflexive foregrounding in the
ideology and Utopia together w
remained intact. With the second
itself, which submits it to a patie
content undisguised and its displa
which in the first film served as
the overt thematics of business it
investments ends up turning t
moment of this historical develop
when American business, and w
obstacle to their internal dynam
Cuban Revolution.

Meanwhile, the Utopian strand of this filmic text, the material of the older patria
family, now slowly disengages itself from this first or ideological one, and, working i
back in time to its own historical origins, betrays its roots in the pre-capitalist
formation of a backward and feudal Sicily. Thus these two narrative impulses as i
reverse each other: the ideological myth of the Mafia ends up generating the authenti
Utopian vision Of revolutionary liberation; while the degraded Utopian content of the
paradigm ultimately unmasks itself as the survival of more archaic forms of repressio
sexism and violence. Meanwhile, both of these narrative strands, freed to pursue their
inner logic to its limits, are thereby driven to the outer reaches and historical bounda
capitalism itself, the one as it touches the precapitalist societies of the past, the other
beginnings of the future and the dawn of socialism.

These two parts of The Godfather--the second so much more demonstrably po

than the first--may serve to dramatize our second basic proposition in the present
namely the thesis that all contemporary works of art--whether those of high culture
modernism or of mass culture and commercial culture--have as their underlying impu
albeit in what is often distorted and repressed, unconscious form--our deepest fa
about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ou
rather to be lived. To reawaken, in the midst of a privatized and psychologizing s

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148 Jameson
obsessed with co
some sense of th
how faintly and f
classics of modern
intervention in c

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