DUKE

UNIVERSITY
PRESS
Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture
Author(s): Fredric Jameson
Source: Social Text, Winter, 1979, No. l (winter, 1979), pp. 130-148
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.or8/stable/466409
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students
discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted di8ltal archive. We use information technology and
tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please
contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions
of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.or8/terms
Duke University Press is collaborating Wlth JSTOR to di8ltize, preserve and extend
access to
Social Text
JSTOR
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture
FREDRIC JAMESON
The theory of mass culture-or mass audience culture, commercial culture, "popular"
culture, the culture industry, as it is variously known-4w always tended to define
its object
against so-called high culture without reflecting on the objective status of this
opposition.
As so often, positions in this field reduce themselves to two mirror-images, and
are
essentially staged in tern]s of value. Thus the familiar motif of elitism argues
for the priority
of mass culture on the groun(ts of the sheer numbers of people exposed to it; the
pursuit of
high or hernietic culture is then stigmatized as a status hobby of small groups of
intellectuals. As its anti-intellectual thrust suggests, this essentially negative
position has
little theoretical content but clearly respon(ts to a deeply rooted conviction in
American
radicalism and articulates a widely based sense that high culture is an
establishment
phenomenon, irredeemably tainted by its association with institutions, in
particular with
the university. The value invoked is therefore a social one: it would be preferable
to deal
with tv programs, Tbe Godfatber, orJaws, rather than with Wallace Stevens or
Henryjames,
because the fornier clearly speak a cultural language meaningful to far wider
strata of the
population than what is socially represented by intellectuals. Radicals are however
also
intellectuals, so that this position has suspicious overtones of the guilt trip;
meanwhile it
overlooks the anti-social and critical, negative (although generally not
revolutionary)
stance of much of the most important forn]s of modern art; finally, it offers no
method for
reading even those cultural objects it valorizes and has had little of interest to
say about
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 Adorno,
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 forn]s 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 terni
"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
FREDIUC JAMESON teaches French at Yale University. His new book,Fables
ofA&gression.. Wyndham Lewis, tlje
Modernist as FaSct, will be published by the University of California Press this
spring.
130
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
Reification & Utopia
or values articulated in other fonns of human work or play. Socially, this meant
that various
kinds of work in such communities were properly incomparable; in ancient Greece,
for
instance, the familiar Aristotelian schema of the fourfold causes at work in
handicraft or
poeisis (material, fornlal, efficient, and final)were applicable only to artisanal
labor, and not
to agriculture or war svhich had a quite different "natural"_which is to say
supernatural or
divine-basis. It is only with the universal commodification of labor power, which
Marx's
Capital designates as the fundamental precondition of capitalism, that all forn of
human
labor can be separated out from their unique qualitative differentiation as
distinct types of
activity (mining as opposed to farn]ing, opera composition as distinct from textile
manufacture), and all universally ranged under the common denominator of the
quantita-
tive, that is, under the universal exchange value of money. At this point, then,
the quality of
the various fornis of human activity, their unique and distinct "ends" or values,
has
effectively been bracketted or suspended by the market system, leaving all these
activities
free to be ruthlessly reorganized in efficiency ternis, as sheer means or
instrumentality.
The force of the application of this notion to works of art can be measured against
the
definition of art by traditional aesthetic philosophy (in particular by Kant) as a
"finality
without an end," that is, &s a goal-oriented activity which nonetheless has no
practical
purpose or end in the "real world" of business or politics or concrete human praxis
generally. This traditional definition surely holds for all art that works as such:
not for stories
that fall flat or home movies or inept poetic scribblings, but rather for the
successful works
of mass and high culture alike. We suspend our real lives and our immediate
practical
preoccupations just as completely when we watch Tbe Godfatljer &s when we read Tbe
Wings of the Dove or hear a Beethoven sonata.
At this point, however, the concept of the commodity introduces the possibility of
structural and historical differentiation into what was conceived as the universal
description of the aesthetic experience as such and in whatever forni. The concept
of the
commodity cuts across the phenomenon of reification-described above in ternis of
actlvlty or production-from a different angle, that of consumption. In a world in
which
everything, including labor power, has become a commodity, en(ts remain no less
undifferentiated than in the production schema-they are all rigorously quantified,
and
have become abstractly comparable through the medium of money, their respective
price
or wage-yet we can now phrase their instrumentalization, their reorganization along
the
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
longer
has any qualitative value in itself, but only insofar as it can be "used" the
various forn]s of
activity lose their immanent intrinsic satisfactions as actlvlty 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:
the
familiar example is that of tourism-the American tourist no longer lets the
landscape "be in
its being" as Heidegger would have said, but takes a snapshot of it, thereby
graphically
transfonning space into its own material image. The concrete activity of looking at
a
landscape-including, no doubt, the disquieting bewildern]ent with the activity
itself, the
anxiety that must arise when human beings, confronting the non-human, wonder what
they
are doing there and what the point or purpose of such a confrontation might be in
the first
place-is thus comfortably replaced by the act of taking possession of it and
converting it
into a fonn of personal property. This is the meaning of the great scene in
Godard's Les
Carabiniers, when the new world conquerors exhibit their spoils: unlike Alexander,
they
131
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
132
Jameson
merely own the images of everything, and triumphantly display their photos of the
Coliseum, the pyrami(ts, Wall Street, Angkor Wat, like so many dirtypictures. This
is also the
sense of Guy Debord's assertion, in an important book, The Society oftbe Spectacle,
that the
ultimate forni of commodity reification in contemporary consumer society is
precisely the
image itself. With this universal commodification of our object world, the familiar
accounts
of the other-directedness of contemporary conspicuous consumption and of the
sexual-
ization of our objects and activities are also given: the new model car is
essentially an image
for other people to have of us, and we consume, less the thing itself, than its
abstract idea,
capable of the libidinal investments ingeniously arrayed for us by advertising.
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 an
aesthetic dimension. The force of the Adorno-Horkheimer analysis of the culture
industry,
however, lies in its demonstration of the unexpected and imperceptible introduction
of
commodity structure into the very forni and content of the work of art itself. Yet
this is
something like the ultimate squaring of the circle, the triumph of
instrumentalization over
that "finality without an end" which is art itself, the steady conquest and
colonization of the
ultimate realm of non-practicality, of sheer play and anti-use, by the logic of the
world of
means and ends. But how can the sheer materiality of a poetic sentence be "used" in
that
sense? And while it is clear howwe can buy the idea of an automobile or smoke for
the sheer
libidinal image of actors, writers, and models with cigarettes in their hands, it
is much less
clear how a narrative could be "consumed" for the benefit of its own idea.
In its simplest forni, this view of instrumentalized culture-and it is implicit in
the
aesthetics of the Tel Quel group as well as in that of the Frankfurt School-
suggests that the
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 of
the way in which at every point the poem is as it were vertical to itself, self-
contained, each
verse paragraph and tableau somehow timeless and immanent, bereft of any necessary
or
indispensible links with what precedes it and what follows; in this light it
becomes possible
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
thc pages bccoming sheer devalued means to an end-in this casc, the
"solution"_which is
itself utterly insignificant insofar as we are not thereby in the real world and by
the latter's
practical standards the identity of an imaginary murderer is supremely trivial.
The detective story is to be sure an extremely specialized forni: still, the
essential
commodification of which it may serve as an emblem can be detected everywhere in
the
sub-genres of contemporary commercial art, in the way in which the materialization
of this
or that sector or zone of such fornis comes to constitute an end and a consumption-
satisfaction around which the rest of the work is then "degraded" to the status of
sheer
means. Thus, in the older adventure tale, not only does the dénouement (victory of
hero or
villains? discovery of the treasure, rescue of the heroine or the imprisoned
comrades, foiling
of a monstrous plot, or arrival in time to reveal an urgent message or a secret)
stand as the
reified end in view ofwhich the rest of the narrative is consumed, this reifying
structure also
reaches down into the very page-by-page detail of the book's composition. Each
chapter
recapitulates a smaller consumption process in its own right, ending with the
frozen image
of a new and catastrophic reversal of the situation, constructing the smaller
gratifications of
a flat character who actualizes his single potentiality (the "choleric" Ned [2nd
finally
exploding in anger), organizing its sentences into paragraphs each of which is a
sub-plot in
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
Reification & Utopia
its own right, or around the object-like stasis of the "fateful" sentence or the
"dramatic"
tableau, the whole tempo of such reading meanwhile overprogrammed by its
intermittent
illustrations which, either before or after the fact, reconfirn] our readerly
business, which is
to transfornl the transparent flow of language as much as possible into material
images and
objects we can consume.
Yet this is still a relatively primitive stage in the commodification of narrative.
More subtle
and more interesting is the way in which, since naturalism, the best-seller has
tended to
produce a quasi-material "feeling tone" which floats above the narrative but is
only
internlittently realized by it: the sense of destiny in family novels, for
instance, or the "epic"
rhythms of the earth or of great movements of "history" in the various sagas can be
secn as
so many commodities towards whose consumption the narratives are little more than
means, their essential materiality then being confinned and embodied in the movie
music
that accompanies their screen versions. This structural differentiation of
narrative and
consumable feeling tone is a broader and historically and forn]ally more
significant
manrfestation of the kind of "fetishism of hearing" which Adorno denounced when he
spoke
about the way the contemporary listener restructures a classical symphony so that
the
sonata forn] itself becomes an instrumental means toward the consumption of the
isolatable
tune or melody.
It will be clear, then, that I consider the Frankfurt School's analysis of the
commodity
structure of mass culture of the greatest interest; rf, below, I propose a somewhat
different
way of looking at the same phenomena, it is not because I feel that their approach
has been
exhausted. On the contrary, we have scarcely begun to work out all the consequences
of
such descriptions, let alone to make an exhaustive inventory of variant models and
of other
features besides commodity reification in terms of which such artifacts might be
analyzed.
What is unsatisfactory about the Frankfurt School position is not its negative and
critical
apparatus, but rather the positive value on which the latter depends, namely the
valorization of traditional modernist high art as the locus of some genuinely
critical and
subversive, "autonomous" aesthetic production. Here Adorno's later work (as well as
Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension) mark a retreat over the dialectically ambivalent
assessment of a Schoenberg's achievement in Tbe Pbilosopty of Modern Music.. what
has
been omitted from the later judgments is precisely Adorno's fundamental discovery
of the
historicity, and in particular, the irreversible aging process, of the greatest
modernist forn]s.
But rf this is so, then the great work of modern high culture-whether it be
Schoenberg,
Beckett, or even Brecht himself--£annot serve as a fixed point or eternal standard
against
which to measure the "degraded" status of mass culture: indeed, fragmentary and as
yet
undeveloped tendencies in recent art production-hyper- or photo-realism in visual
art,
"new music" of the type of Lamonte Young, Terry Riley, or Phil Glass, post-
modernist
literary texts like those of Pynchon--suggest an increasing interpenetration of
high and
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
(mass
culture is popular and thus more authentic than high culture, high culture is
autonomous
and therefore utterly incomparable to a degraded mass culturel-tends to function in
some
timeless realm of absolute aesthetic judgment, is replaced by a genuinely
historical and
dialectical approach to these phenomena. Such an approach demands that we read high
and
mass culture as objectively related and dialectically interdependent phenomena, as
twin
133
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
134
Jameson
and inseparable forn]s of the fission of aesthetic production under late
capitalism. From tl]is
perspective, the dilemma of the double standard of high and mass culture remains,
but it has
become-not the subjective problem of our own standards of judgment-but rather an
objective contradiction which has its own social grounding. Indeed, this view of
the
emergence of mass culture obliges us historically to respecify the nature of the
"high
culture" to which it has conventionally been opposed: the older culture critics
indeed
tended loosely to raise comparative issues about the "popular culture" of the past.
Thus, if
you see Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Don Quijote, still widely read romantic lyric
of the
type of Hugo, or best~selling realistic novels like those ofBalzac or Dickens, as
uniting awide
"popular" audience with high aesthetic quality, then you are fatally locked into
such false
problems as the relative value-weighed against Shakespeare or even Dickens-of such
popular contemporary auteurs of high quality as Chaplin, John Ford, HitchcocK or
even
Robert Frost, Andrew Wyeth, Simenon, or John O'Hara. The utter senselessness of
this
interesting subject of conversation becomes clear when it is understood that from a
historical point of view the only forni of "high culture" which can be said to
constitute the
dialectical opposite of mass culture is that high cultural production
contemporaneous with
the latter, which is to say that artistic production generally designated as
modernism. The
other terni would then be Wallace Stevens, orjoyce, or Schoenberg, orjackson
Pollock, but
surely not cultural artifacts such as the novels of Balzac or the plays of Molière
which
essentially precede the historical separation between high and mass culture.
But such specification clearly obliges us to rethink our definitions of mass
culture as
well: the commercial products of the latter can surely not without intellectual
dishonesty
be assimilated to so-called popular, let alone, folk art of the past, which
reflected and were
dependent for their production on quite different social realities, and were in
fact the
"organic" expression of so many distinct social communities or castes, such as the
peasant
village, the court, the medieval town, the polis, and even the classical
bourgeoisie when it
was still a unified social group with its own cultural specificity. The
historically unique
tendencial effect of late capitalism on all such groups has been to dissolve and to
fragment or
atomize them into agglomerations (Gesellscbaften) of isolated and equivalent
private
individuals, by way of the corrosive action of universal commodification and the
market
system. Thus, the "popular" as such no longer exists, except under very specific
and
marginalized conditions (internal and external pockets of so-called
underdevelopment
within the capitalist world system). The commodity production of contemporary or
industrial mass culture thus has nothing whatsoever to do, and nothing in common,
with
older forms of popular or folk art.
Thus understood, the dialectical opposition and profound structural
interrelatedness of
modernism and contemporary mass culture opens up a whole new field for cultural
study,
which promises to be more intelligible historically and socially than research or
disciplines
which have strategically conceived their mission as a specialization in this or
that branch
(e.g., in the university, English vs. Popular Culture departments or programs). Now
the
emphasis must lie squarely on the social and aesthetic situation-the dilemma of
forn] and
of a public--shared and faced by both modernism and ma&s culture, but "solved" in
antithetical ways. Thus, in another place, I have suggested that modernism can also
be most
adequately understood in ternis of that commodity production whose all-inforniing
structural infiuence on mass culture we have described above: only for modernism,
the
omnipresence of the commodity forn] deterniines a reactive stance, so that
modernism
conceives its fonnal vocation to be the resistance to commodity forn], not to be a
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
Reification & Utopia
commodity, to devise an aesthetic language incapable of offering commodity
satisfaction,
and resisLint to instrumentalization. The difference between this position and the
valorization of modernism by the Frankfurt School (or, later, by Tel Quel) lies in
its
designation of modernism as reactive, that is, as a symptom and a result of
cultural crisis,
rather than a new "solution" in its own right: not only is the commodity the prior
form in
ternis of which alone modernism can be structurally grasped, but the very ternis of
its
solution-the concq)tion of the modernist text as the production and the protest of
an
isolated individual, and the logic of its sign systems as so many private languages
("styles" )
and private religions-are contradictory and make the social or collective
realization of its
aesthetic project (Mallarnié's ideal of Le Livre can be taken as the latter's
fundamental
fornlulation) an impossible one (a judgment which, it ought not to be necessary to
add, is
not a judgment of value about the "greatness" of the modernist texts).
Yet there are other aspects of the situation of art under late capitalism which
have
remained unexplored and offer equally rich perspectives in which to examine
modernism
and mass culture and their structural dependency. Another such issue, for example,
is that
of materialization in contemporary art-a phenomenon woefully misunderstood by much
contemporary Marxist theory (for obvious reasons, it is not an issue that has
attracted
academic fornialism). Here the misunderstanding is dramatized by the pejorative
emphasis
of the Hegelian tradition (Lukacs as well as the Frankfurt School) onphenomena of
aesthetic
reification-which furnishes the terni of a negative value judgment-in juxtaposition
to the
celebration of the "material signifier" and the "materiality of the text" or of
"textual
production" by the French tradition which appeals for its authority to Althusser
and lacan.
If you are willing to entertain the possibility that "reification" and the
emergence of
increasingly materialized signifiers are one and the same phenomenon-both
historically
and culturally-then this ideological great debate turns out to be based on a
fundamental
misunderstanding. Once again, the confusion stems from the introduction of the
false
problem of value (which fatally programs every binary opposition into its good and
bad,
positive and negative, essential and inessential ternis) into a more properly
ambivalent
dialectical and historical situation in which reification or materialization is a
key structural
feature of both modernism and mass culture.
The task of defining this new area of study would then initially involve making an
inventory of other such problematic themes or phenomena in ternis 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
forn]al
reactions of modernism and mass culture to their common social situation, and that
is the
notion of repetition. This concept, which in its modern forni we own to
Kierkegaard, has
known rich and interesting new elaborations in recent post-structuralism: for Jean
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 free-
floating absence of "the referent" (e.g., the place hitherto taken by nature, by
raw materials
and primary production, or by the "originals" of artisanal production or
handicraft) utterly
unlike anything experienced in any earlier social fornlation.
If this is the case, then we would expect repetition to constitute yet another
feature of
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 one
135
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
136
Jameson
need only invoke the traditional ideological stance of all modernizing theory and
practice
from the Romantics to the Tel Quel group, and passing through the hegemonic
forniulations
of classical Anglo-American modernism, to observe the strategic emphasis on
innovation
and novelty, the obligatory break with previous styles, the pressure--geometrically
increasing with the ever swifter historicity of consumer society, with its yearly
or quarterly
style and fashion changes-to "make it new" to produce something which resists and
breaks through the force of gravity of repetition as a universal feature of
commodity
equivalence. Such aesthetic ideologies have to be sure no critical or theoretical
value-for
one thing, they are purely formal and by abstracting some empty concept of
innovation from
the concrete content of stylistic change in any given period end up flattening out
even the
history of fornis, let alone social history, and projecting a kind of cyclical view
of change-
yet they are useful symptoms for detecting the ways in which the various modernisms
have
been forced, in spite of themselves, and in the very flesh and bone of their forn],
to respond
to the objective reality of repetition itself. In our own time, the post-modernist
conception
of a "text" and the ideal of schizophrenic writing openly demonstrate this vocation
of the
modernist aesthetic to produce sentences which are radically discontinuous, and
which
defy repetition not merely on the level of the break with older forn]s or older
forn]al models
but now within the microcosm of the text itself. Meanwhile, the kinds of repetition
which,
from Gertrude Stein to Robbe-Grillet, the modernist project has appropriated and
made its
own, can be seen as a kind of homeopathic strategy whereby the scandalous and
intolerable
external irritant is drawn into the aesthetic process itself and thereby
systematicallyworked
over, "acted out" and symbolically neutralized.
But it is clear that the infiuence of repetition on mass culture has been no less
decisive.
Indeed, it has frequently been observed that the older generic discourse&-stlat1Zed
by
the various modernist revolutions which have successively repudiated the older
fixed
forn]s of lyric, tragedy, and comedy, and at length even "the novel" itself, now
replaced by
the unclassifiable "Livre" or "text"--continue a powerful afterlife in the realm of
mass
culture. Paperback drugstore or airport displays reinforce all of the now sub-
generic
distinctions between gothic, bestseller, mysteries, science fiction, biography, or
porno-
graphy, as do the conventional classification of weekly tv series, and the
production and
marketing of Hollywood films (to be sure, the generic system at work in
contemporary
commercial film is utterly distinct from the traditional patteni of 1930s and 1940s
production, and has had to respond to television competition by devising new meta-
generic
or omnibus forms, themselves generally reduplicated by "original" novels: these
omnibus
fornis, however-the "disaster film" is only the most recent such innovation-at once
become new "genres" in their own right, and fold back into the usual generic
stereotyping
and reproduction).
But we must specify this development historically: the older pre-capitalist genres
were
signs of something like an aesthetic "contract" between a cultural producer and a
certain
homogeneous class or group public; they drew their vitality from the social and
collective
statu&-which to be sure varied widely according to the mode of production in
question-
of the situation of aesthetic production and consumption, that is to say, from the
fact that the
relationship between artist and public was still in one way or another a social
institution and
a concrete social and interpersonal relationship with its own validation and
specificity.
With the coming of the market, this institutional status of artistic consumption
and
production vanishes: art becomes one more branch of commodity production, the
artist
loses all social status and faces the options of becoming apoète maudlt or a
journalist, the
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
Reification & Utopia
relationship to the public is problematized, and the latter becomes a virtual
"public
introuvable" (the appeals to posterity, Stendhal's dedication "To the Happy Few,"
or
Gertrude Stein's remark, "I write for myself and for strangers," are revealing
testimony to
this intolerable new state of affairs).
The survival of genre in emergent mass culture can thus in no way be taken as a
return to
the stability of the publics of pre-capitalist societies: on the contrary, the
generic fonns and
signals of mass culture are very specifically to be understood as the historical
reappropria-
tion and displacement of older structures in the service of the qualitatively very
different
situation of repetition. The atomized or serial "public" of mass culture wants to
see the same
thing over and over again, hence the urgency of the generic structure and the
generic signal:
rfyou doubt this, think of your own consternation at finding that the paperbackyou
selected
from the mystery shelf turns out to be a romance or a science fiction novel; think
of the
exasperation of people in the row next to you who bought their tickets imagining
that they
were about to see a thriller or a political mystery instead of the horror or occult
film actually
underway. Think also of the much misunderstood "aesthetic bankruptcy" of
television: the
structural reason for the inability of the various television series to produce
episodes which
are either socially "realistic" or have an aesthetic and formal autonomy that
transcends
mere variation, has little enough to do with the talent of the people involved
(although it is
certainly exacerbated by the increasing "exhaustion" of material and the ever-
increasing
tempo of the production of new episodes), but lies precisely in our'set" towards
repetition.
Even if you are a reader of Kaffta or Dostoyevsky, when you watch a cop show or a
detective
series, you do so in expectation of the stereotyped format and would be annoyed to
find the
video narrative making "high cultural" demands on you. Much the same situation
obtains
for film, where it has however been institutionalized as the distinction between
American
(now multinational) film-detennining the expectation of generic repetition-and
foreign
films, which detern]ine a shifting of gears of the "horizon of expectations" to the
reception
of high cultural discourse or so-called art films.
This situation has important consequences for the analysis of mass culture which
have
not yet been fully appreciated. The philosophical paradox of repetition-fonnulated
by
Kierkegaard, Freud, and others-can be grasped in this, that it can as it were only
take place
"a second time." The first-time event is by definition not a repetition of
anything; it is then
reconverted into repetition the second time round, by the peculiar action of what
Freud
called "retroactivity" [Nacbtraglichkeit]. But this means that, as with the
simulacrum, there
is no "first time" of repetition, no "original" of which succeeding repetitions are
mere
copies; and here too, modernism furnishes a curious echo in its production of books
which,
like Hegel's Phenomenology or Proust or Finnegans Wake, you can only reread. Still,
in
modernism, the hern]etic text remains, not only as an Everest to assault, but also
as a book to
whose stable reality you can return over and over again. In mass culture,
repetition
effectively volatilizes the original object-the "text," the '%vork of art"--so that
the student
of mass culture has no primary object of study.
The most striking demonstration of this process can be witnessed in our reception
of
contemporary pop music of whatever type-the various kinds of rocK blues, country
western, or disco. I will argue that we never hear any of the singles produced in
these
genres "for the fst time" instead, we live a constant exposurc to them in all kinds
of
different situations, from the steady beat of the car radio through the sounds at
lunch, or
in the work place, or in shopping centers, all the way to those apparently full-
dress
performances of the '%vork" in a nightclub or stadium concert or on the records you
buy
137
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
138
Jameson
and take home to hear. This is a very different situation from the first bewildered
audition of
a complicated classical picce, which you hear again in the concert hall or listen
to at home.
The passionate attachment one can forn] to this or that pop single, the ricn
personal
investment of all kinds ofprivate associations and existential symbolism which is
the feature
of such attachment, are fully as much a function of our own familiarity as of the
work itself:
the pop single, by means of repctition, insensibly becomes part of the existential
fabric of
our own lives, so that what we listen to is ourselves, our own previous auditions.
Under these circumstances, it would make no sense to try to recover a feeling for
the
"original" musical text, as it really was, or as it migtit have been heard "for the
first time."
Whatever the results of such a scholarly or analytical project, Its object of study
would be
quite distinct, quite differently constituted, from the same "musical text" grasped
as mass
culture, or in other words, as sheer repetition. The dilemma of the student of mass
culture
therefore lies in the structural absence, or repetitive volatilization, of the
"primary texts"
nor is anything to be gained by reconstituting a "corpus" of texts after the
fashion of, say, the
medievalists who work with pre-capitalist generic and repetitive structures only
super-
ficially similar to those of contemporary mass or commercial culture. Nor, to my
mind, is
anything explained by recourse to the currently fashionable tenn of
"intertextuality,"
which seems to me at best to designate a problem rather than a solution. Mass
culture
presents us with a methodological dilemma which the conventional habit of positing
a
stable object of commentary or exegesis in the fonn of aprimary text orwork is
disturbingly
unable to focus, let along to resolve; in this sense, also, a dialectical
conception of this field
of study in which modernism and mass culture are grasped as a single historical and
aesthetic phenomenon has the advantage of positing the survival of the primary text
at one
of its poles, and thus providing a guide-rail for the bewildering exploration of
the aesthetic
universe which lies at the other, a message mass or semiotic bombarthnent from
which the
textual referent has disappeared.
The above reflections by no means raise, let alone address, all the most urgent
issues
which confront an approach to mass culture today. In particular, we have neglected
a
somewhat different judgment on mass culture, which also loosely derives from the
Frankfurt School position on the subject, but whose adherents number "radicals" as
well as
"elitists" on the Left today. This is the conception of mass culture as sheer
manipulation,
sheer commercial brainwashing and empty distraction by the multinational
corporations
who obviously control every feature of the production and distribution of mass
culture
today. If this were the case, then it is clear that the study of mass culture would
at best be
assimilated to the anatomy of the techniques of ideological marketing and be
subsumed
under the analysis of advertising. Roland Barthes, seminal investigation of the
latter,
however, in his MYt}logies, opened them up to the whole realm of the operations and
functions of culture in everyday life; but since the sociologists of manipulation
(with the
exception, of course, of the Frankfurt School itselfj have, almost by definition,
no interest in
the hernietic or "high" art production whose dialectical interdependency with mass
culture we have argued above, the general effect of their position is to suppress
considerations of culture altogether, save as a kind of sand-box affair on the most
epiphenomenal level of the superstructure. The implication is thus to suggest that
real
social life-the only features of social life worth addressing or taking into
consideration
when political theory and strategy is at stake are what the Marxian tradition
designates as
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
Reification & Utopia
the political, the ideological, and the juridical levels of superstructural
reality. Not only is
this repression of the cultural moment detennined by the university structure and
by the
ideologies of the various discipline&-thus, political science and sociology at best
consi
cultural issues to that ghettoizing rubric and marginalized "field of
specialization" called the
"sociology of culture"_it is also and in a more general way the unwitting
perpetuation of
the most fundamental ideological stance of American business society itself, for
which
"culture"_reduced to plays and poems and high-brow concerts-is par excellence the
most trivial and non-serious activity in the "real life" of the rat race of daily
existence. Yet
even the vocation of the esthete (last sighted in the U.S. during the pre-political
heyday of
the 1950s and of his successor, the university literature professor, had a socially
symbolic
content and expressed (generally unconsciously) the anxiety aroused by market
competi-
tion and the repudiation of the primacy of business pursuits and business values:
these are
then, to be sure, as thoroughly rq)ressed from academic fornialism as culture is
from the
work of the sociologists of manipulation, a repression which goes a long way
towards
accounting for the resistance and defensiveness of contemporary literary study
towards
anything which smacks of the painful reintroduction of just that "real life"
the socio-
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 montmy 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, infiation itself-all are images, all come before us with
the
immediacy of cultural rq)resentations 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 tbe Eartb, 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 ifwe do not realize that it is a problem, rather than a
choice or a ready-
139
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
140
Jameson
made option-suggests an important qualification to the scheme outlined in the first
part of
the present essay. The implied presupposition of those earlier remarks was that
authentic
cultural creation is dependent for its existence on authentic collective life, on
the vitality of
the "organic" social group in whatever forni (and such groups can range from the
classical
polis to the peasant village, from the commonality of the ghetto to the shared
values of an
embattled pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie). Capitalism systematically dissolves the
fabric of
all cohesive social groups without exception, including its own ruling class, and
thereby
problematizes aesthetic production and linguistic invention which have their source
in
group lrfe. The result, discussed above, is the dialectical fission of older
aesthetic expression
into two modcs, modernism and mass culture, equally dissociated from group praxis.
Both
of these modes have attained an admirable level of technical virtuosity; but it is
a daydream
to expect that either of these semiotic stuctures could be retransfornied, by fiat,
miracle, or
sheer talent, into what could be called, in its strong forni, political art, or in
a more general
way, that living and authentic culture of which we have virtually lost the memory,
so rare an
experience it has become. This is to say that of the two most infiuential recent
Left
aesthetic&-the Brecht-Benjamin position which hoped for the transforniation of the
nascent mass-cultural techniques and channels of communication of the 1930s into an
openly political art, the Tel Quel position which reaffirn]s the "subversive" and
revol-
utionary efficacy of language revolution and modernist and post-modernist fornial
innovation-we must reluctantly conclude that neither addresses the specific
conditions of
our own time.
The only authentic cultural production today has seemed to be that which can draw
on
the collective experience of marginal pockets of the social life of the world
system: black
literature and blues, British working-class rock, women's literature, gay
literature, the
mman quebecois, the literature of the Third World; and this production is possible
only to
the degree to which these fornis of collective life or collective solidarity have
not yet been
fully penetrated by the market and by the commodity system. This is not necessarily
a
negative prognosis, unless you believe in an increasingly windless and all-
embracing total
system; what shatters such a system-it has unquestionably been falling into place
all
around us since the development of industrial capitalism-is however very precisely
collective praxis or, to pronounce its traditional and unmentionable name, class
struggle.
Yet the relationship between class struggle and cultural production is not an
immediate
one; you do not reinvent an access onto political art and authentic cultural
production by
studding your individual artistic discourse with class and political signats.
Rather, class
struggle, and the slow and interniittent development of genuine class
consciousness, are
themselves the process whereby a new and organic group constitutes itself, whereby
the
collective breaks through the reified atomization (Sartre calls it the seriality)
of capitalist
social life. At that point, to say that the group exists and that it generates its
own specific
cultural life and expression, are one and the same. This is, if you like, the third
term missing
from my initial picture of the fate of the aesthetic and the cultural under
capitalism; yet no
useful purpose is served by speculation on the forn]s such a third and authentic
type of
cultural language might take in situations which do not yet exist. As for the
artists, for them
too "the owl of Minerva takes its flight at dusk," for them too, as with Lenin in
April, the test
of historical inevitability is always after the fact, and they cannot be told any
more than the
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 manipulation.
Manipulation theory implies a psychology, but this is all very well and good:
Brecht taught
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
Reification & Utopia
us that under the right circumstances you could remake anybody over into anything
you
liked (Mann istmann), only he insisted on the situation and the raw materials fully
as much
or more than on the techniques. Perhaps the key problem about the concept, or
pseudo-
concept, of manipulation can be dramatized by juxtaposing it to the Freudian notion
of
repression. The Freudian mechanism, indeed, comes into play only after its object-
trauma,
charged memory, guilty or threatening desire, anxiety-has in some way been aroused,
and
risks emerging into the subject's consciousness. Freudian repression is therefore
deter-
minate, it has specific content, and may even be said to be something like a
"recognition" of
that content which expresses itself in the forn] of denial, forgetfulness, slip,
mauvaisefoi,
displacement, substitution, or whatever.
But of course the classical Freudian model of the work of art (as of the dream or
the
joke) was that of the symbolic fulfillment of the repressed wish, of a complex
structure of
indirection whereby desire could elude the repressive censor and achieve some
measure of
a to be sure purely symbolic satisfaction. A more recent "revision" of the Freudian
model,
however-Nornian Holland's The Dynamics of Literary Respons&-proposes a scheme
more useful for our present problem, which is to conceive how (commercial) works of
art
can possibly be said to "manipulate" their publics. For Holland, the psychic
function of the
work of art must be described in such a way that these two inconsistent and even
incompatible features of aesthetic gratificat10n-n the one hand, its wish-
fulfilling
function, but on the other the necessity that its symbolic structure protect the
psyche
against the frightening and potentially damaging eruption of powerful archaic
desires and
wish-material--be somehow harmonized and assigned their place as twin drives of a
single
structure. Hence Holland's suggestive conception of the vocation of the work of art
to
manage this raw material of the drives and the archaic wish or fantasy material. To
rewrite
the concept of a management of desire in social ternis now allows us to think
repression and
wish-fulfillment together within the unity of a single mechanism, which gives and
takes alike
in a kind of psychic compromise or horse-trading, which strategically arouses
fantasy
content within careful symbolic containment structures which defuse it, gratifying
intolerable, unrealizable, properly imperishable desires only to the degree to
which they
can again be laid to rest.
This model seems to me to pern]it a far more adequate account of the mechanisms of
manipulation, diversion, degradation, which are undeniably at work in mass culture
and in
the media. In particular it allows us to grasp mass culture not as empty
distraction or'mere"
false consciousness, but rather as a transforn]ational work on social and political
anxieties
and fantasies which must then have some effective presence in the mass cultural
text in
order subsequently to be "managed" or repre&sed. Indeed, the initial reflections of
the
present essay suggest that such a thesis ought to be extended to modernism as well,
even
though we will not here be able to develop this part of the argument further. I
will therefore
argue that both mass culture and modernism have as much content, in the loose sense
of the
word, as the older social realisms; but that this content is processed in a very
different way
than in the latter. Both modernism and mass culture entertain relations of
repression with
the fundamental social anxieties and concerns, hopes and blind spots, ideologic
antinomies and fantasies of disaster, which are their raw material; only where
modernism
tends to handle this material by producing compensatory structures of various
kinds, mass
culture represses them by the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and
by the
projection of an optical illusion of social harniony.
141
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
142
Jameson
I will now demonstrate this proposition by a reading of three extremely successful
recent commercial films: Jaws (nowJaws l), and the two parts of Tbe Godfatber. The
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 SIlficant changes in the original narrative;
our
attention to such strategic alterations may indeed arouse some Initi 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 vid andPravda 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 internat fears about the unreality of daily lrfe 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
po&sible mortality. Now none of these readin&s 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
ternis 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
confiict with other forn]s 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 tern]s 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 her(F-or heroefv-whose mythic task it is to rid the civilized
world of the
archetypal monster. This is, however, precisely the issue-the naturc and the
specification
of the "mythic" her(-abOUt which the discrepancies between the film and thc novcl
have
something instructive to tell us. For the novel involves an undisguised expression
of class
confiict in the tension between the island cop and the high-society oceanographer,
who
used to summer in Easthampton and en(ts up sleeping with Brody's wrfe: Hooper is
indeed a
much more important figure in the novel than in the film, while by the same token
the novel
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
Reification & Utopia
assigns Quint a very minor role in comparison to his crucial presence in the film.
Yet the
most dramatic surprise the novel holds in store for viewers of the film will
evidently be the
discovery that in the book Hooper dies, a virtual suicide and a sacrifice to his
somber and
romantic fascination with death in the person of the shark. Now while it is unclear
to me
how the American reading public can have responded to the rather alien and exotic
resonance of this element of the fantasy-the aristocratic obsession with death
would seem
to be a more European motif-the social overtones of the novel's resolution-the
triumph
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
transforn]ed, 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 transfornied 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 confiict between
these two
characters has for some reason that remains to be formulated been transforn]ed into
a vision
of their ultimate partnership, and joint triumph over l£viathan. 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 tern] 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 forn]ulate
it in a
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 detern]inations 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
143
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
144
Jameson
older America-the America of small business and individual private enterprise of a
now
outmoded kind, but also the America of the New Deal and the crusade against Nazism,
the
older America of the depression and the war and of the heyday of classical
liberalism.
Now the content of the partnership between Hooper and Brody projected by the film
may be specified socially and politically, as the allegory of an alliance between
the forces of
law-and-order and the new technocracy of the multinational corporations: an
alliance
which must be cemented, not merely by its fantasized triumph over the ill-defmed
menace
of the shark itself, but above all by the indispensable precondition of the
effacement of that
more traditional image of an older America which must be eliminated from historical
consciousness and social memory before the new power system takes its place. This
operation may continue to be read in ternis of mythic archetypes, if one likes, but
then in
that case it is a Utopian and ritual vision which is also a whole-very alarnling-
political and
social program. It touches on present-day social contradictions and anxieties only
to use
them for its new task of ideological resolution, symbolically urging us to bury the
older
populisms and to respond to an image of political partnership which projects a
whole new
strategy of legitimation; and it effectively displaces the class antagonisms
between rich and
poor which persist in consumer society (and in the novel from which the film was
adapted)
by substituting for them a new and spurious kind of fraternity in which the viewer
rejoices
without understanding that he or she is excluded from it.
Jaws is therefore an excellent example, not merely of ideological manipulation, but
also
of the way in which genuine social and historical content must be first be tapped
and given
some initial expression if it is subsequently to be the object of successful
manipulation and
containment. In my second reading, I want to give this new model of manipulation an
even
more decisive and paradoxical turn: I will now indeed argue that we cannot fully do
justice
to the ideological function of works like these unless we are willing to concede
the
presence within them of a more positive function as well: of what I will call,
following the
Frankfurt School, their Utopian or transcendent potential-that dimension of even
the most
degraded type of mass culture which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly,
negative and critical of the social order from which, as a product and a commodity,
it
springs. At this point in the argument, then, the hypothesis is that the works
ofmass culture
cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or
explicitly
Utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of
content as
a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated. Even the "false
consciousness" of so
monstrous a phenomenon of Nazism was nourished by collective fantasies of a Utopian
type, in "socialist" as well as in nationalist guises. Our proposition about the
drawing power
of the works of mass culture has implied that such works cannot manage anxieties
about the
social order unless they have first revived them and given them some rudimentary
expression; we will now suggest that anxiety and hope are two faces of the same
collective
consciousness, so that the works of mass culture, even rf 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 ternis may testify: we have already commented on
the
sterility of the older kind of ideological analysis, which, ignoring the Utopian
components of
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
Reification & Utopia
mass culture, ends up with the empty denunciation of the latter's manipulatory
function and
degraded status. But it is equally obvious that the complementary extreme-a method
that
would celebrate Utopian impulses in the absence of any conception or mention of the
ideological vocation of mass culture--simply reproduces the litanies of myth
criticism at its
most academic and aestheticizing and impoverishes these texts of their semantic
content at
the same time that it abstracts them from their concrete social and historical
situation.
The two parts of The Godfatljer 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 to
see that ideology is not necessarily a matter of false consciousness, or of the
incorrect or
distorted representation of historical "fact," but can rather I 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 FJ.S.T. )
can often
provide a suggestive lead towards ideological function: not because there is any
scientific
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
ideological
paradigm into which it has been thereby forcibly assimilated.
The Godfatber, however, obviously works in and is a perniutation of a generic
convention; one could write a history of the changing social and ideological
functions of
this convention, showing how analogous moti£s are called upon in distinct
historical
situations to emit strategically distinct yet symbolically intelligible messages.
Thus the
gangsters of the classical 30s films (Robinson, Cagney, etc.) were dramatized as
psychopaths, sick loners striking out against a society essentially made up of
wholesome
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
ultimately
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 505 and the early 60s: this
very
distinctive narrative content-a kind of saga or family material analogous to that
of the
medieval cljansons de geste, with its recurrent episodes and legendary figures
returning
again and again in different perspectives and context&-can at once be structurally
differentiated from the older paradIS by its collective nature: in this, reflecting
an
evolution towar(ts 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 transfonnation of post-war American
social life and a global transfornlation of the potential logic of its narrative
content without
yet specify-ing the ideological function of the Mafia paradigm itself. Yet this is
surely not very
difficult to identify. When indeed we reflect on an organized conspiracy against
the public,
one which reaches into every corner of our daily lives and our political structures
to
exercise a wanton ecocidal and genocidal violence at the behest of distant
decision-makers
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 forni.
What
kind of crime, said Brecht, is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a
bank? Yet
145
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
146
Jameson
until recent years, American business has enjoyed a singular freedom from popular
criticism
and articulated collective resentment; since the depolitization of the New Deal,
the
Mccarthy era and the beginning of the Cold War and of media or consumer society, it
has
known an inexplicable holiday from the kinds of populist antagonisms which have
only
recently (white collar crime, hostility to utility companies or to the medical
profession)
shown signs of reemerging. Such freedom from blame is all the more remarkable when
we
observe the increasing squalor that daily life in the U.S. owes to big business and
to its
unenviable position as the purest forni of commodity and market capitalism
functioning
anywhere in the world today.
This is the context in which the ideological function of the myth of the Mafia can
be
understood, as the substitution of crime for big business, as the strategic
displacement of all
the rage generated by the American system onto this mirror-image of big business
provided
by the movie screen and the various tv series, it being understood that the
fascination with
the Mafia remains ideological even if in reality organized crime has exactly the
importance
and infiuence in American life which such representations attribute to it. The
function of
the Mafia narrative is indeed to encourage the conviction that the deterioration of
daily life
in the United States today is an ethical rather than an economic matter, connected,
not with
profit, but rather "merely" with dishonesty, and with some omnipresent moral
corruption
whose ultimate mythic source lies in the pure Evil of the Mafiosi themselves. For
genuinely
political insights into the economic realities of late capitalism, the myth of the
Mafia
strategically substitutes the vision ofwhat is seen to be a criminal aberration
from the nonn,
rather than the norn] itself; indeed, the displacement of political and historical
analysis by
ethical judgments and considerations is generally the sign of an ideological
maneuver and
of the intent to mystify. Mafia movies thus project a "solution" to social
contradiction&-
incorruptibility, honesty, crime fighting, and finally law-and-order itself-which
is evi-
dently a very different proposition from that diagnosis of the American misery
whose
prescription would be social revolution.
But if this is the ideological function of Mafia narratives like Tbe Godfatber,
what can be
said to be their transcendent or Utopian function? The latter is to be sought, it
seems to me, in
the fantasy message projected by the title of this film, that is, in the family
itself, seen as a
figure of collectivity and as the object of a Utopian longing, if not a Utopian
envy. A narrative
synthesis like Tbe Godfather is possible only at the conjuncture In which ethnic
content-
the reference to an alien collectivity-comes to fill the older gangster schemas and
to
infiect them powerfully in the direction of the social; the superposition on
conspiracy of
fantasy material related to ethnic groups then triggers the Utopian function of
this
transformed narrative paradigm. In the United States, indeed, ethnic groups are not
only the
object of prejudice, they are also the object of envy; and these two impulses are
deeply
intern]ingled and reinforce each other mutually. The dominant white middle-class
group&-already given over to anomie and social frawentation and atomization-find in
the ethnic and racial groups which are the object of their social repression and
status
contempt at one and the same time the image of some older collective ghetto or
ethnic
neighborhood solidarity; they feel the envy and ressentiment of the Gesellschaft
for the
older Gemeinschaft which it is simultaneously exploiting and liquidating.
Thus, at a time when the disintegration of the dominant communities is persistently
"explained" in the (profoundly ideological) tern]s of a deterioration of the
family, the
growth of perniissiveness and the loss of authority of the father, the ethnic group
can seem
to project an image of social reintegration by way of the patriarchal and
authoritarian family
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
Reification & Utopia
of the past. Thus the tightly knit bonds of the Mafia family (in both senses), the
protective
security of the (god-)father with his omnipresent authority, offers a contemporary
pretext
for a Utopian fantasy which can no longer express itself through such outmoded
paradigms
and stereotypes as the image of the now extinct American small town.
The drawing Wer of a mass cultural artifact like The GodfatlRr may thus be
measured by its twin capacity to perfonn an urgent ideological function at the same
time
that it provides the vehicle for the investment of a desperate Utopian fantasy. Yet
the film is
doubly interesting from our present point of view in the way in which its sequel-
released
from the restrictions of the bestselling fictional text on which Part I was based-
tangibly
betrays the momentum and the operation of an ideological and Utopian logic in
something
like a free or unbound state. Godfatljer II, indeed, offers a striking illustration
of Pierre
Macherey's thesis, in Towards a Theory ofLiteraryPmduction, that the work ofart
does not
so much express ideology as, by endowing the latter with aesthetic representation
and
figuration, it en(ts up enacting the latter's own virtual unmasking and self-
criticism.
It is as though the unconscious ideological and Utopian impulses at work in
GodfatherI
could in the sequel be observed to work themselves towards the light and towards
thematic
or reflexive foregrounding in their own right. The first film held the two
dimensions of
ideology and Utopia together within a single generic structure, whose conventions
remained intact. With the second film, however, this structure falls as it were
into history
itself, which submits it to a patient deconstruction that will in the end leave its
ideological
content undisguised and its displacements visible to the naked eye. Thus the Mafia
material,
which in the first film served as a substitute for business, now slowly transfonns
itself into
the overt thematics of business itself, just as "in reality" the need for the cover
of legitimate
investments ends up turning the mafiosi into real businessmen. The climactic end
moment of this historical development is then reached (in the film, but also in
real history)
when American business, and with it American imperialism, meet that supreme
ultimate
obstacle to their internal dynamism and Structurally necessary expansion which is
the
Cuban Revolution.
Meanwhile, the Utopian strand of this filmic text, the material of the older
patriarchal
family, now slowly disengages itself from this first or ideological one, and,
working its way
back in time to its own historical origins, betrays its roots in the pre-capitalist
social
forn]ation of a backward and feudal Sicily. Thus these two narrative impulses as it
were
reverse each other: the ideological myth of the Mafia ends up generating the
authentically
Utopian vision Of revolutionary liberation; while the degraded Utopian content of
the family
paradigm ultimately unmasks itself as the survival of more archaic fornis of
repression and
sexism and violence. Meanwhile, both of these narrative strands, freed to pursue
their own
inner logic to its limits, are thereby driven to the outer reaches and historical
boundaries of
capitalism itself, the one as it touches the precapitalist societies of the past,
the other at the
beginnings of the future and the dawn of socialism.
147
These two parts of The Godfather-the second so much more demonstrably political
than the first-may serve to dramatize our second basic proposition in the present
essay,
namely the thesis that all contemporary works of art-whether those of high culture
and
modernism or of mass culture and commercial culture-have as their underlying
impulse-
albeit in what is often distorted and repressed, unconscious form-our deepest
fantasies
about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our
bones it ought
rather to be lived. To reawaken, in the midst of a privatized and psychologizing
society,
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis
148
Jameson
obsessed with commodities and bombarded by the ideological slogans of big business,
some sense of the ineradicable drive towards collectivity that can be detected, no
matter
how faintly and feebly, in the most degraded works of mass culture just as surely
as in the
classics of modernism-is surely an indispensable precondition for any meaningful
Marxist
intervention in contemporary culture.
This content downloaded from
67.81.243.57 on Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:01:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.j stor.org/ternis