chapter 4 the logic of totalizationshodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/7308/9/09_chapter...
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Chapter 4
The Logic of Totalization
Jameson's priodization of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism
represents it in the light of history and this historicization is undertaken from the
perspective of the totalizing vision of Marxism which constitutes "the enabling conditions
of a possibility of a theoretics, conceptualizations of culture which lay bare its social
function, its meaning in history" (Gross 1989: 98). It has been mentioned above that this
totalization is not a homogenization of the various pluralities but a dialectical
accommodation of the heterogeneous elements of postmodernism and a laying bare of the
deeper dialectical interrelationship between them. A coinage of Sartre, the term
'?otalization," Jmeson says, means "to envelope and find a least common denominator
for the twin hwnan activities of perception and action." The concept of totalization i s
"designed in part to stress the unification inherent in human action" and hence it can be
specified as "an equivalent for 'praxis' itself." It is "the unification of a construct, the
interrelating of a new idea to the old ones, the active securing of a new perception . . . its
conversion into a new form." In a Sartrean sense totalizing is "that process whereby,
actively impelled by the project, an agent negates the specific object or item and
reincorporates it into the larger project-in-course" (1 99 1 a: 332-33). In other words, the
operation of totalizing is the "process of summing up from a perspective of making
connections, of existential negation and reincorporation, and of engaging in praxis"
(Gross 1989: 118).
Jameson wants that totalization be sharply distinguished from" "totality" with
which i t is often "indistinctly confounded." The concept of totality is the "apparent
ideological cognate" of the concept of totalization and it is "one philosophical form of the
notion of a 'mode of production"' (199Ia: 334, 333). 'To Jameson totality is "the social
whole in which 'everything depends on everything else"' (1971 a: 188). Steven Best
argues that there are "acceptable and unacceptable uses of the concept" of totality and it is
without discriminating between the two that poststructuralists attack todizing thought.
He says that totality suggests concretely existing structures and defines it a? a "system"
comprising "parts that are constituted by the whole system to which they belong and
which interrelate with that system." What this definition of totality suggests i s that in a
social formation things are "relational and systemic" in character, and that there exists "a
method whereby these relatima1 entities can be theorized and grasped." Distinguishing
between the acceptable and unacceptable versions of totalizing, Best says that the former
is a "contextualizing act which situates seemingly isolated phenomena within their larger
relational context and draws connections (or mediations) between the different aspects of
a whole." The latter, on the other hand, is a reductive process which "forces all particulars
within a single theoretical perspective at the expense of 'textual' difference and
complexity." Jameson' s periodi~ation and analysis of postmodernism. we have seen,
belong to the former category which grasps "systemic relationships while respecting
diikrence, discontinuity, relative autonomy and uneven development" (Best 1 989: 343-
44). Susan Wells approves of this method of totalization and asserts that for Jarneson
totality is a strategic rather than a transcendent concept. It is the mark of a
systemic attempt to objectify the world and to establish the boundaries of a
system's coherence, simultaneously marking them as boundaries and
warning the reader to test the truth of the relations that hold within them.
(quoted in Burnham 1995: 100)
Jameson denies that the unifying involved in totalizing i s done "with an eye to
power and control." Neither does it try to establish "a baggdge of first principles" as
fundamental to a conceptually secure scholastic system, nor does it institute and
legitimate terror in the name of some utopia or ultimate truth. On the other hand, its
dialectical method "unmasks the privileging of a given type of content as 'reification'."
Because the dialectic is the ''unity of theory a d practice." it seeks to transform the world
into "a meaningful totality suck that 'totality' in the form of a philosophical system will
no longer be required." So, Jameson concludes, any repudiation of' the concept of
totali7ation has to be "most plausibly decoded as a systematic repudiation of notions and
ideals of praxis as such, or of the collective project" ( 1 99 1 a: 332-34).
It will appear that there is a deep paradox in Jarneson's attempt to "grstsp"
postmodemism by " a periodizing or totalizing abstraction" which lies in "the seeming
contradiction between the attempt to unify a field" of various identities and "the logic of
the very impulses" of this field which is characterized as the "logic of difference or
differentiation" and acknowledged as "sheer heteronymy and the emergence of random
and unrelated subsystems of all kinds" (Jameson 1991 a: 342). Andrew Ross alleges that
the Mmist totalizing method can no longer "make sense of h e fragmented and various
ways in which people live and negotiate the everyday life of consumer capitalism" and i t
cannot account for "the complex ideological processes through which our various local,
insertions into that global economy are represented and reproduced (1989b: xv).
Accordingly, Jameson's efforts could be characterized as inconsistent with the spirit of
postmodernism itself. Steven Best says that Jameson's conceptual unification "preserve[s]
differences, dispersions, and discontinuities" at the same time that it provides "the general
context of determination common to every aspect of the whole" (1989: 347). Jameson
himself says that his periodizing hypothesis "ought'to be understood as an "attempt to
'muster,' 'dominate "' the postmodem, and "to 'muster ' history." It i s an effort to master
"the escape from the nightmare of history," to conquer "the otherwise seemingly blind
and natural 'laws' of socioeconomic fatality" ( 1 99 1 a: 342-3, emphasis added). Arguing
that the question of contradiction in his "unified theory of differentiation" rests on "a
confusion between levels of abstraction," Jameson reiterates that "a system that
constitutively produces differences remains a system." The concept of differentiation that
the ideology of pluralism projects is itself a "systematic one" that "turns the play of
differences into a new kind of identity on a more abstract level" (1991 a: 343). The dekdils
of this differentiation at the social level will be examined later.
The prodigious global expansion of capital during the third stage of its
development that Jameson has underlined following Ernest Mandel and Giovanni Arti ghi
has had its effects in the sociopolitical realms as well. This process which started by the
end of the nineteen sixties in Western Europe was extended to the Third World countries
by the early eighties and with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Socialist
Eastern Bloc countries, capitd and its logic seem to have left no more space to be
penetrated into. This has resulted in what Jarneson calls "an immense freeing or
unbinding of socid energies, a prodigious release of untheorized new forces" and in fresh
perspectives on political economy and political organizations including the very concepts
of national governments ( 1 988b: 210). The new world order is a much publicized
ideology in which the rhetoric of the freedom of the global market is high on the agenda.
Needless to say, the construction of this ideology of globalization is immensely aided by
the postmodem technology.
'Ihere is no doubt that the nexus between the media and the market plays a vital
role in propagating the idea of globalization. Such media rhetoric, writes Jameson,
not only reinforce[s] . . . international consumerist styles but even more
importantly Dlock[s] the formation of autonomous and alternate cultures
based on different values or principles. . . . This clearly enough makes
culture ... into a far more central political issue than it ever was in previous
moments of capi talism. (1 996a: 17- 18)
This stifling of the growth of alternate and autonomous cultures, it has to he understood,
is in direct contradiction to what the pluralistic ideology of postmodernism projects.
'I'he globalization of capital has rendered the older nation states ineffective. The
new world order has seen the end of national autonomy and sovereignty. Conceptions
such as national autonomy and the welfare state have become unpopular today and are
"energetically discredited by the media," says Jameson. For Third World countries like
India and Brazil, this seems to be "reassuring," for they appear to be competing to be
"integrated into the world market" the consequences of (not) doing which are
"perpetuated by world information circuits and exported entertainment" (1 996a: 1 7). Ilis
rhetoric of the market is part of the "corporate speech" which was discussed in chapter
two. Jameson's idea can be explained in the following way. With the integration of
countries into the global market the capitalist forces are allowed free reins to seduce and
determine the needs, tastes, desires and thereby the very life of a people. Thus the citizens
of a country are transformed into nothing more than consumers of a globa I market and the
nation-state, even as an idea, loses its very relevance. The autonomy and sovereignty of
the nation-state and all ideas associated with the concept of a welfare state which were
held high in the modem period have now become redundant. Consequently, political and
ideological struggles have been displaced into the space of the market which, needless to
say, is controlled by capitalist forces.
Zygrnunt Rauman has drawn attention to how the growing penetration of the life-
world by capital has emancipated power from democratic institutions. T%e "emancipation
of state from democratic control," "the emancipation of the political state Erom public
control," results in the domination and colonization of civil society as 'Yhe sphere of
reproduction of consumers," that is to say, men and women whose interests in autonomy
are permanently redirected to fit the needs of the market" (1987: 92). Samir Amin's
observations on the process of globalization also justify Jamesan's views on the nation-
state being made an obsolete concept. He says that it is the political strategy underlying
globatization to disarm. weaken and disintegrate nation-states in order to strengthen the
market forces. It is as part of this stmtegy that these forces encourage all kinds of
religious, sub-national, ethnic and other forms of struggles for "identity" so as to sabotage
established societal forms led by strong governments. It is important to remember that the
Third World countries had succeeded in mustering the support oC the various religious,
ethnic, linguistic and other such minorities in their anti-colonial liberation movements and
in the early stages of their national reconstruction. The very legitimacy of the newly
independent nation-states depended on their ability in integrating these various groups
into the body of the nation and reaffirming their participation in the process of rebuilding
the nation. They were successful, too, in these efforts to a great extent. But with the
opening of the frontiers of the states to the vagaries of the market and the weakening of
the governments, forces of disintegration set in leaving the question of the very concept of
a nation-state open to suspicion (Amin 1998).
'The restructuration of capitalism bas had its effects in the social realm as well. It
is well known that modernity was a long period of individualism and social atomization
and, consequently, the autonomous artistic realm of modernism has been considered the
creation of individual geniuses, the great auteurs and their private inimitable styles. We
have any number of examples for the variety of solitary figures as existential heroes and
anti-heroes, artists, freaks and eccentrics who are victims of the experience of anomie,
rebels whose liberal imagination impels them to adopt seemingly 'revolutionary'
positions against existing social system, But with the much celebrated 'death of the
subject' the postmodern society is witness to extraordinary modifications of social reality.
The process of these modifications is visible as "an objective historical tendency"
affecting all sections of society in the form of the "organization and collectivi~ation of
individuals" into new social movements (Jameson 1991a: 321). This process, Jameson
says, has been described as "the emergence of new 'subjects of history' of a non-class
type." He relates ''the emergence of these new 'identities'," "these new social and
political categories (the colonized, race, marginality, gender and the like) to something
like a crisis'' in the traditional social class ( 1 988b: 181). The "micropolitics" that
corresponds to the emergence of the "nnon-class political practices" of these new social
movements is "an extraordinarily historical" as we1 I as "a profoundly postmodern"
phenomenon, says Jameson (1 991 a: 3 18- 19).
This postmodern tendency towards collective organization "envelopes" all
sections of society alike and the "most systemic and abstract analysis" of it, writes
Jarneson, "assigns the ultimate systemic condition of possibility for all such group
emergence . . . to the dynamics of late capitalism itself' (1991a: 325). Jarneson argues
that "the global restructuration of production and the introduction of radicdy new
technologies" have thrown workers in traditional industrial workplaces out of work,
"displaced new kinds of industry to unexpected parts of the world, and recruited
workforces different from the traditional ones in a variety of features from gender to skill
and nationality" (1 99 1 a: 3 19). That there have been structural transformations and
displacement of the workforce and transplantation of industries to the newty decolonized
'Shird World countries are historical facts attention to which have been drawn by Eric
Hobsbawm and Hans-Georg Betz (Hobsbawm 1 992b: 302, Betz 1992).
Klaus Eder, in his essay "A New Social Movement?" ( 1 982) argues that these new
social movements referred to above contain neo-romantic and neo-populist forms
combining cultural and political tendencies and that pushing beyond modernity toward a
postindustrial order they emerged in response to the developments within capitalist
modernity ( 1 982: 10-16). Steven Rest and Douglas Kellner suggest that these groups
emerge from "highly complex and differentiated political context" and attempt to
"articulate and oppose the specific fonns of oppression affecting different groups and
individuals." The politics of gender, race, ethnicity, and other forms of marginalized
subject positions espoused by these groups "valorize their differences from other groups
and individuals." They have been included "within the rubric of 'postmodern politics"'
and have been "theorized under the banners of both the 'politics of difference7 and the
'politics of identity'." 'These new political groupings of "categories neglected in previous
modern politics," Best and Kellner say, attempt 90 mobilize a politics based on the
construction of political and cultural identities through political struggle and
commitment" (1 991 : 205).
While Jarneson accepts that there have been changes within the structure of the
traditional working class, he says that "it is premature to deplore the weakening of class
consciousness in our society today." He has no doubt that ours is a class society and
"class struggle continues at every instant." This class consciousness is "alive and well in
collective fantasy, and in the ongoing stories and images people tell themselves about
history, in their narrative anxieties about their hture and their past" (1982~: 77). He
refuses to believe that these small groups have emerged in a space left vacant by the
disappearance of the traditional working class. For, he asks: how can classes be expected
to disappear except in the "unique special case scenario of socialism"? ( I 991 a: 3 1 9). This
claim, Jameson argues, is put forward by the "self-congratulatory rhetoric" of capitalist
democracy and pluralism: "the system congratulating itself for producing ever more
greater quantities of structurally unemployable subjects7' ( 1 991 a: 320). That the number
of structurally unemployable subjects has been increasing and that the traditional working
class has been weakened ever since the shift in the structure of capitalism in the
postmodern times described in chapter one is corroborated by many writers (Hobsbawrn
1992b: 302-03, Harvey 1989: 150-56, Baurnan 1987: 83). But this does not mean that
class distinctions have disappeared and that groups and institutions rather than classes and
economic factors condition and determine cultural forces in society. Douglas Kellner has
drawn attention to recent studies which disclose that the dominant trend of social
development in late capitalism is a "class stratification" in which "class divisions and
inequalities are increasing rather than diminishing" ( 1 989b: 229).
How, then, is the emergence of the smdi groups to be accounted for? According
to .lameson, it is the "Utopian impulses" of the nineteen sixties that were responsible for
the wide range of L'micropolitical movements" (1 991 a: 160). Since the end of the sixties,
he writes, there has been a ''well-nigh universal feeling of powerlessness," a strong
"conviction as to the fundamental impossibility of any form of real systemic change in
our societies" and a sense of the "futility of all forms of action or praxis'' which accounts
for "the passionate adherence to" the various forms of small groups (1 996a: 18). Mostly
predicated on issues such as neighbourhood politics, racial, ethnic, gender, ecological and
other such issues with a single agenda, Jameson argues, these movements have "the
resurgent problematic of Nature in a variety of (often anticapitalist) forms," as a
*'common denominator," and they constitute "the repudiation of a traditional left party
politics and thereby, in their own way, as another 'end of ideology"' (1991a: 160). The
dynamics of the small groups also display a "seriality" in their politics whereby each
group "simultaneously imagines itself to be a minority oppressed by another group
(which feels the same way)" (1994a: 64). These individual microgroups, says Jameson,
"attempt to define themselves against the larger hegemonic structures by identifying what
is often imperfectly called a group or collective 'identity'," an identity that is based h l l y
"as much on solidarity as on alienation or oppression" and which feeds on "whatever 1
collective structures seem to resist the anomie of the modern industrial state and to offer
some negative and critical power" (1994a: 66-7). Jameson emphasizes the specificity of
each group's experience of domination and asserts that there is an ultimate commonality
in their experiences within late capitalism (1988e: 69-70). Underlining the molecular
nature of these social movements Stanley Aronowitz says that they are "communitztrian"
and "speak for their own local aspirations against the power of multinationals that control
their labour power and also against the national state" that is now no more than a mere
agent of capital (1988: 59-60). But Jameson does not think that all these groups do enjoy
"lahour power" as Aronowitz does. It is Aronowitz's conviction that in these new
movements "the union is the repository of the broad social vision" which is "linked to the
neighbourhoods, as well a? to the workplace. In short, it is a cultural as well as an
economic form" (1 988: 6 t ).
Jameson argues that these movements are related to "the institutional
collectivization of contemporary life." He explains that this is, in fact, the realization of
"one or Marx's fundamental prophesies, that within the 'integument' of individual
property relations (private ownership of the factory or enterprise) a whole new web of
collective production relations was coming into being incommensurable with its
antiquated shell. husk, or form" (1991a: 320). It is only to be expected that after a Jong
period of individualism and projection of individual heroes and the philosophy of
existentialism in a capacious social order there follows a period of a collectivization of
individuals. In support of his proposition that it is the dynamics of capitalism itself that is
ultimately responsible for the small groups Jarneson points out that in the decentered and
schizophrenic society of late capitalism, the "semi-autonomy" of the heterogeneous
level.^" in the ''structural totality'' that Althusser elaborated relaxes into "autonomy tout
court" and the different instances will have "no organic relationship to one another at all."
The consequence is the emergence of the idea that having no necessary relationship
whatsoever to others, every level has to develop strategies and struggles appropriate to
itself. "With this ultimate 'meltdown' of the Althusserian apparatus," writes Jameson,
"we are in the . . . world of microgroups and micropolitics." He is convinced that these
small groups constructed on single issues repudiate "old fashioned class and party politics
of a 'totalizing' kind" and their strategies and concerns "cut across . . . many classical
forms of 'public' or 'oficial' political action including the electoral kind" ( 1 988b: 192).
What is at stake in such microgroup politics are "misconceptions of 'totalization' and
reification of the theme of power and domination, concludes Jameson ( I 994a: 64).
Jameson uses the paradoxical slogan of "difference relates" to present his thesis that in
the ultimate instance all these levels are related somehow or other to the social totality.
"l'heorjes of difference," he says, emphasize "disjunction" and separate identity so much
that the differences fall apart into "a set of elements which entertain separations from one
another" (1991a: 31). The moment at which identity is made "the dominant or
fundamental category ," Jameson argues, is, in fact, "the moment of Difference" when it
becomes obvious that "'it is identity as difference that is identical with itself ." This
Hegelian notion tells us that a thing can be identified in "its innermost identity only by
showing what it is not" (1 998b: 80).
Ernesto I,aclau and Chantal Mouffe are two important post-Marxist theorists and
ideologues of the micropolitical movements whose observations on the postmodem
movements deserve attention. They challenge the central significance of the category of
class as the locus of political consciousness and argue that no society can be statically
explained. For them the focus has to be more on local political actors arid their differences
and diversity than on their common relationship to the means of production. A plurality of
collective actions is generated from this fluidity of identities. Hence, these social
movements have to be the primary focus for any serious analytical engagement with
historical and political agency in society. They argue that the structural transformations
within the capitalist mode of production leading to the emergence of postindustrial forms
of life. the associated decline of the working class, and the disappointments linked to the
failure of fbrmerly existing socialism are all responsible for the emergence of these
movements. They insist that the diverse range of social identities are purely relational, a
consequence of the "articulation within a hegemonic formation" and that they are not
subordinate to a priori class struggles and demands (1985: 84-7). With the emergence of
this plurality of sociopolitical movements ideas like the singularity or unity of history,
universal subject and society as an intelligible structure have been dissolved. The
contemporary social and political struggles cannot be analyzed with the help of the
traditional Mamian tools of class, history and society which are intelligible totalities
constituted around conceptually explicable laws. The postmodem condition demands a
new politics based upon the project of a radical democracy which will deconstruct the
classical Marxist categories, and the conception of subjectivity and classes ( 1 985: 2-4).
In T,aclau and Mouffe's formulation the field of social differences is not fixed on
the basis of the single constitutive principle of class but based on the unstable and
changing conditions in which contemporary political struggles and movements emerge
and develop. They emphasize the "open, non-sutured character of the social" and find a
link between the emergence of the new relatively fluid sociopolitical movements and the
associated predominance of a hegemonic form of politics ( 1 985: 1 38). The new sociai
movements and forms of social conflict are representations of new forms of political
subjectivity antagonistic to new relations of subordination and they are externions of
democratic revolution. Common to all these forms of movements is the constitution of a
social identity, which simultaneously introduces a division into the social space, a
division predicated on relations of equivalence through which political identity and
difference are formed. They express themselves more by affirming liberalism than in
terms of collective struggle, because they constitute forms of resistance to accelerating
processes of commodification, bureaucratization and homogenization (1 985: 1 64-5). The
weakening of the structural unity of the working class and the absence of a political
identity of the traditional working class in the postindustrial scenario make possible the
emergence of the "plurality of the social and the unsutured character of all political
identity" (1 985: 166).
1,aclau and Mouffe problematize the concept of a unified class subject suggesting
that it obscures the process of discursive constitution through which the plurality of
pol iticat subjectivities are constituted and impedes the development of a radical and plural
democracy. There is no privileged form of subjectivity nor any
privileged position from which a uniform continuity of effects will follow,
concluding with the transformation of society as a whole. All struggles
whether those of workers or other political subjects, have a partial
character, and can be articulated to very different discourses. . . . There is,
therefore, no subject . . . which is aksolutely radical and irrecuperable by
the dominant order and which constitutes an absolutely guaranteed point of
departure for a total transformation. (1985: 169)
The implication of statements such as these is that in the postmodern context of the
erosion of a politics based on class interests and class perceptions it is necessary to
radicalixe the conception of the social agent and of social antagonism and to
accommodate the plurality of social agents within an extended field of diverse social
conflicts.
Thoughts on the crisis in the Marxian paradigm have always been generated
whenever capitalism, Marxism's fundamental object of study, has seemed to undergo
structural changes, like the latest one engineered by the economic crisis of the 1970s and
the technological revolution. Laclau and MouiTe's proposals for a radical revision of
Marxism follow the lines of Eduard Bernstein's Presuppositions r$ Socialism und the
Tasks of Social Democracy that appeared in 1898, the year Ernest Mandel points out as
the beginning of the third stage of capitalism. All these post-Marxisms, Jameson says,
seem to suggest that "chssicai capitalism no longer exists and has given way to this or
that 'post-capitalism"' in which the features described by Marx and particularly ''the
dynamic of antagonistic social classes and the primacy of the economic" no longer exist
(1996a: 2 1). Jameson considers it a mistake to suppose that "the historically original
dynamics of capitalism have undergone a mutation or an evolutionary restructuration"
because the basic drives of capitalism to increase the tempo of technological change and
to generate maximum profit are still there in it along with their corresponding
consequences in the sociocultural realms (1 996a: 22). He points out that what l,enin,
Mandel and Giovannj Arrighi have tirelessly shown over the years is that during all the
periods of crises which capitalism has faced it has, as a system, rejuvenated itself by "a
convulsive enlargement" and "extension of its logic and its hegemony" over ever larger
geographical areas ( 1 996a: 24). Drawing attention to the contemporary global expansion
of capital and its decentrali7atjon on which the new post-Mamists predicate their
arguments for the irrelevance of Mamian paradigms Jameson says that though they tell us
something significant about changes in social life today conceptually it is only within the
structure of the new world system of capitalism that the "emergence of the new internal---
existential or empirical-social--- phenomena" can be understood ( 1 996a: 25-6).
As for the post-Marxist argument that the category of class i s inadequate,
outmoded and irrelevant, Jameson says that with the globalization of capital and the
internationalization of the process of production it is only natural to expect that the
process of a new global class formation is inevitable. Only, it is difficult to map this
ioaccessi ble reality ( 1 996a: 39). Jameson proposes "cognitive mapping" to do this, details
of which will be discussed in the next chapter. The "alleged incompatibility" between a
class politics and the priorities of the postmodem micropolitical movements "reflects" an
American perspective in which race and gender loom larger than class. From this
perspective class is treated as '?he badge" of just another group of individuals. Jameson
argues that class is a "universalizing" category and "a form of abstraction capable of
transcend; ng individuality and particularity" and hence different in conceptual status from
race and gender. Class is an "nntological" category and hence its "truth" lies in "the
operations to which i t gives rise." So, even in the absence of a coherent "philosuphy" of
class, Jameson writes, class analysis remains "valid and indispensable" (1996a: 40). He
adds that class consciousness is
as "internally conflicted" as categories like race and gender: class
consciousness turns first and foremost around subalternity, that is around
the experience of inferiority. This means that "the lower classes" carry
about within their heads unconscious cortvictions as to the superiority of
hegemonic or ruling-class expressions and values, which they equally
transgress and repudiate in ritualistic (and socially and politically
ineffective) ways. (1996a: 41)
Jameson concludes that "class investments operate according to a formal rather than a
content-oriented dynamic" and hence class is "both an ongoing social reality and an
active component of the social imaginary" which in late capitalism informs our "maps of
the world system." It absorbs and refracts gender and racial connotations and their
oppositions in such a way that once the focus shifts from "a world system" to " a regional"
one. the class map is "rearticulated in new ways." Thus, class can be seen as always being
"contingent and embodied, as always having to realize and specify itself by way of the
categories of gender and race" ( 1 996a: 4 1 -3).
Jarneson refers to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffc's argument that it is from
the passion for equality that these social movements spring. This argument, he says, i s
"less attentive to the tendency to differentiation and separatism, infinite fission and
'nominalism'" in microgroup politics (1991a: 3 19). Separatism, he says, is "the very
precondition" for any group unification and requires "mass cultural standardization" and
consumption for its sustenance (1 994a: 105). It needs to be underlined that the very logic
of capitalism is ultimately dependent on the equal right to consumption. The capitahst C
sysiem has a "fundamental interest in social equality to the degree to which it needs to
transform as many of its subjects or its citizens into identical consumers interchangeable
with everybody else" (1977a: 844). Thus, it is to be understood that late capitalism's deep
interest in the endless production and proliferation of all kinds of new groups i s with a
view to perpetuating and realizing its own market interests. It is in this context that the
concept of class becomes all the more important for political people interested in radical
social theory and in systemic changes.
Vincent L,eitch points out that Jameson displays "a mixed reaction" to this
proliferation of microgroups and argues that
[tlhe pluralistic postmodern idea of groups as the motor force of historical
change subverts master narratives about the proletariam subject of history
and the coming revolution. With the emergence of groups, the notion of a
"ruling class" departs, as does the idea of production. ( 1 992: 1 1 3-1 4)
Pluralism, lameson admits, is the ideology of groups. But the fact is that the concept of
"difference" an which this ideology rests is nothing more than "Iiberal tolerance." And, as
a social fact, isn't the tolerance of difference "the result of social homogenization and
standardization and the obliteration of genuine social difference"? Jameson asks. He
points out that "one's being condemned to be identified as a member of a group" is
entirely different from a voluntary choice of "the badge of a group membership because
its culture has become publicly valorized" (1 991 a: 341 ). It is this valorization which
makes many o f these groups hot media topics and "accredited sociological categor[iesjm
"always under scrutiny" and given as many different labels as possible by specialists and
experts. "Everyone today is, if not organized, then organizable," says Jameson (1991a: *
322). Thus, everyone in the postmodern times seems to represent several groups all at
once and "everything in our social reality is a badge of group membership and connotes a
specific hunch of people" (Sameson I991a: 347). This "retreat into ever smaller groups of
the faithful," says Zygmunt Bauman, is "sectarian" and its politics leads to demands for
"shortcuts" and sometimes to "terrorism" (1987: 82).
Ciroup representation is "anthropomorphic" and gives the impression that "the
social world [is] divided up and colonized down to the last segment by its collective
actors and the allegorical representatives," says Jameson. Because the framework of
groups i s Lbinslibution," they have a much better mobilizing force offering mch member of
the group "the gratification of psychic identity (from nationalism to neoethnicity)."
Aronowitz recognizes the oppositional potential of these rnargind groups and realizing
that capital can subvert the margins by making them fashionable he suggests that
marginality should not be valorized per se as a form of subversion (1 98 t : 1 96-7). But the
interest generated in them by the media has transformed them into images and thus allows
"the amnesia of their own bloody pasts, of persecution and untnuchability." These images
can now be "consumed" as commodities. Jameson says that the media have become "their
parliament and the space of their representation in the political fully as much as the
semiotic sense" (1991 a: 346-7). Though groups are so small that they a1 low for "libidinal
investments" of a "narrative kind." there are "representational paradoxes" that we find in
group narratives. Jameson articulates this paradox thus:
since the ideology of groups comes into being simultaneously with the
well known death of the subject (of which it is simply an alternate version)
. . . the consequences will be that these new collective characters and
representations that are groups cannot any longer, by definition, be
subjects. ( 1 99 1 a: 348)
Thus, Jameson concludes, these groups can never function as class and can never replace
it as a functional substitute because no group can ever have a systemic perspective .
C'lasses are too large and "more material, more impure and scandalously mixed."
They are determined by factors involving the production of material objects and the
"relations determined by that along with the forces of the respective machinery." They
emerge by "slow transformations in the mode of production" and seem "perpetually at
distance from themselves and have to work hard to be sure they really exist as such." The
class function is "mediated by the system as a u~hoie" and hence through class categories
we can see down "to the rocky bottom of the stream" (1991a: 346-8). Jameson
emphasizes "the difference in conceptual status" between the idea of social class and that
of micropolitical groups. He means that class is an "ontological" and a "universaiieing"
category, "a form of abstraction capable of transcending individuality and particularity"
in such a productive way that "the upshot of that transcendence is envisioned to be the
abolition of the category itself' (1996a: 40). 'This is something which the groups never
allow because of their minimal perspectives and that i s why Jameson says that they can
never be the substitute for class and the subject of history which Marx discovered in the
form of the proletariat. Jarneson argues that "in the pluralism of the co1lective groups. and
no matter how 'radical' the imrniseration or marginalization of the group in question, it
can no longer fill that structural role, for the simple reason that the structure has been
modified and the role suppressed" (1 99 1 a: 348). He suggests that, historically. this is only
to be expected because "the transitional nature of the new global economy has not yet
allowed its classes to form in any stable way, let alone acquire genuine class
consciousness so that the very lively social struggles of the current period are largely
dispersed and archaic" (1 991a: 348-9). Thus, it is Jarneson's contention that the "new
social movements and the newly emergent global proletariat both result from the
prodigious expansion of capitalism in its third (or 'multinational') stage; both are in that
sense 'postmodern"' ( 1 99 1 a: 3 1 9). Jarneson's preference for class politics that these
passages amply demonstrate is a genuinely political choice of a systemic perspective with
a view to achieving revolutionary change in the social formation.
Jameson has been blamed for being "virtually silent on a whole range of
formations such as feminism, ethnic studies, discourses of sexuality etc., and yet rnakring]
total and global claims" (Radhakrishnm 1989: 322). Vincent I,eitch complains that
Jameson has nothing to offer on feminism and pastcolonial theory and that his theory of
the mode of production "celebrates sameness aver difference" (1 992: 1 19). It is true that
Jameson does not offer any detailed treatment of feminism or the postcolonial theory. But
the social movements that he speaks of and some of which have been discussed in these
pages include feminism as well. Tbe observations he makes on these movements cannot
be ignored. He suggests that distinctive "moments of truth can be found in feminist
theorizing and in the group experiences of women, Blacks and Central European Jews.
And, to understand a group's "moment of truth" is to understand how their social
constraints make possible an otherwise unavailable social experience as well as to
translate such experience into "new possibilities of thought and knowledge" (1 988e: 70).
He acknowledges that "we have lemed many things from feminism" and that "much o f
the political force of feminism comes from its collective dimension, i ts status as the
culture and ideology of a genuine social group." But he observes that this force "ties
back" with "the force of the collective as such" and with "the political problems raised
today by the dynamics of microgroups or small group politics" (1982~: 90). During the
postmodem times, Jameson remarks, capital has menacingly penetrated the enclave of the
"nonpaid labour of the older interior or home or family" thereby "unbinding and
liberating that enormous new social force of women who immediately then pose an
uncomfortable new threat to the new social order" (1988b: 47). He also says that
"feminism has been virtually alone in attempting to envision the Utopian languages
spoken in societies in which gender domination and inequality would have ceased to
exist" (1991a: 107). These remarks prove to be unfounded the allegations of McGowan
that Jameson fails "to appreciate the potential of the new social movements" and that "his
sometimes less than subtle characterization of the working class, women and of the Third
World peoples are disappointing" (1991: 158). McGowan himself says that in
acknowledging "the political potential of the women's movement" fameson speaks of "a
more contradictory, more conflictual and less monolithic social result stemming from late
capitalism's invasion of the family" (1 991 : 156).
Observations like these are evidences enough to prove that Jameson acknowledges
the significance of feminism. But, i t i s true that he does not approve of the politics of a
single point agenda and minimal perspectives of such micropolitical movements. His
argument for not doing so is that the values of these movements are "preeminently
cooptable" because as ideals they are already "inscribed in the very ideology of capitalism
itself' and hence they are "part of the internal logic" of capitalism. He claims that the *r
capitalist system is "structurally unabte to realize such ideals even where it has an
economic interest in doing so" (1977a: 844). Sean Homer agrees with Jameson's
contention pointing out that "arguments for a politics of difference and pluralism are not
necessarily progressive and can serve the needs of capital rather than those of the
oppressed gmups themselves." He also adds that "it is the very plurality of groups that
miligates against any effective political action taking place at a systemic level" (1998:
f 79). 'This is why Jameson says that race and sex and other such categories are
"theoretically subordinate to the categories of social class" (1977a: 844). He prefers an
"older politics" based on class that seek '90 coordinate local and global stmggles"
endowed with an "allegorical value" of L4representing the overall struggle itself and
incarnating it in a here-and-now thereby transfigured" ( I 991 a: 330).
Jameson recognizes that these marginalized groups represent the questions raised
by millions who have been discarded not only by the system itself but by the traditional
left as welt. There is no denying that the issues and claims raised by these microgroups
are a fresh set of political demands which transform and give a new dimension to the very
concept of the political in late capitalism. Though he acknowledges the value of politics at
the micro-level, why is Jameson unwilling to give in to micropolitical practice? The
answer i s unequivocal:
Politics works only when these two levels [the local and the global] can be
coordinated. They otherwise drif? apart into a disembodied and easily
bureaucratized abstract struggle for and around the state, on the one hand,
and a properly interminable series of neighbourhood issues on the other.
(1991a: 330)
Genuine political changes, in other words, by which society can be meaningful1y
transformed, can be brought about only at the systemic level. Struggles at the
micropolitical level remain ineffective unless they represent struggles, or are allegories
for transformation at the systemic level. Jameson reminds us that the dynamics of the
commitment to social change are derived from
the objective experience o f social reality and the way in which one isolated
cause or issue, one specific form of injustice, cannot be fulfilled or
correlated without eventually drawing the entire web of intemelaed social
levels together into a totality, $vhich then demands the invention of a
politics of social transformation. (1 990a: 25 1 )
Douglas Kellner remarks that what jameson prosects here is an "Althusserian totality of
relatively autonomous levels which reciprocally interact within a decentered structural
totality" (1 989d: 3 1). "Far Althusser, as for Jameson," says Steven Best. "unity is
achieved on1 y through difference" ( I 989: 347).
The politics that Jameson speaks about in the passage quoted above is a
revolutionary socialist politics which is systemic in nature coordinating all these
autonomous levels or instances of society in an effective manner. Any meaningful politics
of difference, he i s sure, is made possible only when "a considerable degree of social
standardization comes into being, that is to say, [when] universal identity is largely
secured." Rut it has to be understood that the kind of "radical difference that holds
between Columbus and the people he encountered can never be articulated into a politics"
(Jameson 1994a: 66). Acknowledging the value of this argument for systemic .politics
Sean Homer writes that at a time when theories of the politics of difference try to jettison
changes at the systemic level "Jarneson's reassertion of the need to retain some notion,
albeit utopian, of complete social transformation is singularly important" (1998: 178).
This totalizing concept for social transformation, Victor t i remarks, "will remain long
after Marxism's distorted official and institutional forms have passed away" ( I 99 1 : 140).
.lameson's view, referred to above, that the ideology of pluralism is nothing but
liberal tolerance is vindicated by Eagleton's observation that the politics of difference
cannot go "beyond traditional liberalism." Postmodernism with its acknowledged zest, he
writes,
for plurality, multiplicity, provisionality, anti-totality, open-endedness and
the rest, has the look of a sheepish liberalism in wolfs clothing. . . .
Differences cannot fully flourish while men and women languish under
forms of exploitation; and to combat those forms effectively implicates
ideas 01' humanity which are necessarily universal. ( 1 997: 1 20-2 1 )
It is this necessity for changes at the systemic level that Jameson highlights in his
totalizing critique of the politics of difference projected by the social movements. His
opinions on these small groups have much in common with what Eagleton has to say
about them. Pluralism, it has to be said, though seemingly encourages differences among
the various groups, "refuses to recognize that what different . . . groups have in common
socially and economically is finally more important than their cultural differences" ( 1 997:
I 22). No one will deny that these marginal i7ed groups have been subjected to exploitation
and imrniseration by capitalism. What they have in common is more important for "the
purposes of their political emancipation" (Eagleton 1997: 1 22). So, the hasic plank of
cultural difference on which these microgroups are constructed is ':just the flipside of a
spurious universalism'" and, what 3amesoa advocates is a revolutionary systemic change
to socialism whose political goal will be "the emancipation of difference at the level of
human mutuality or reciprocity" (Eagleton 1997: 120).
Jameson's insistence on the need to retain a conception of revolutionary class
politics is consistent with the aim of his texts since Murxi.~m und Form to set the critical
and political function of Marxist totalization against the currently fashionable
poststructuralist theories promoting nominalism in the name of pluralism. "The argument
about system," Jarneson writes, "that everything in society is ultimately connected to
everything else" and that "in the long run it is impossible to achieve the most minimal
reforms without first changing everything." that is to say, the system as a whole, has been
stigmatized as a notion of totality by poststructuralist theories (1996a: 36). Victor 1,i
comments that it is "in h e name of difference, flux, dissemination and heterogeneity" that
the poststructuralists repudiate totality, but, to Jameson, "the new ideologies of difference,
like the old positivisms they had replaced, merely 'reconfirm the status of the concept of
totality by their very reaction against it'." Their ideologies predicated on pluralism,
"[tlhough advocating openness," and seemingly "more openly political," writes Li,
"really function as local forms of closure. 'strategies of containment"' that obstruct "any
concerted political programme of radical change" (1 99 1 : 1 32). Though Jmeson's project
of totalization is "beset with problems," concludes Li, it is at the same time "the strongest
theoretical aspect of [his] work" ( I 99 1 : 140).
Jameson's critique of the nominalist tendencies of the micropolitical groups, as
explained above, shows how the postmodernist ideology of pluralism and the r
poststructuralist anti-systemic valorization of differences reproduce late capitalism's own
logic of proliferation and differentiation. He feels that the poststructuralist call to wage
war on totality is misplaced and what is really at stake in the "wars on totality" is the very
concept of Utopia, which, in other words, can be explained as "the systemic
transformation of contemporary society" (199 t a: 334). For Jameson the concept of social
totality has great significance for any genuine politics aimed at transformation of society
and %ithout such a concept "no properly socialist politics is possible" ( 1 988d: 355). In
other words, the aspiration towards totality points "toward a collective project" ( 1 988e:
60). And. the rejection of the concept of totality for the sake of pluralism and the politics
of difference implies a rejection of the possibility of transforming the capitalist system
itself.
This argument of Jameson i s supported by the following observation of David
1-larvey who, emphasizing '?he potential connection between place and social identity . . .
manif'ttst in political action," says that the dilemmas consequent on the uneven
development of capital are shared by "the socialist working class movements" and the
postmodern micropolitical groups in the face of "a universalizing capitalism." These
groups, he continues, are "relatively empowered to organize in place but disempowered
when it comes to organizing over space." This happens because when they cling on to
their place bound identity they give themselves in to be "a part of the very fragmentation
whjch a mobile capitalism and flexible accumulation can feed upun." Though Harvey
acknowledges the potential of these groups for localized resistance he is convinced that
"they cannot bear the burden of radical historical change done" ( 1989: 303).
The "political motivation" of the "war on totality" and the association of the 5
concept ol' totality with "'I'error" and totalitarianism, Jameson says, lies "in a fear of
ITtopia" and Utopian revolutionary politics (1991a: 401). He suggests that this is, in fact,
a notion as old as Edmund Burke but revived successfully by the Cold War rhetoric.
"Ideologically." this rhetoric "turns on a bizarre identification of Stalin's gulags with
Hitler' s extermination camps." Jamestln argues that contrary to what this rhetoric tries to
propagate the history of revolutionary convulsions proves that "violence springs from
counterrevolutions first and foremost" and that "the most effective form of
counterrevolution lies precisely in this transmission of violence tn the revolutionary
process itself." He obsewes that the allegation of terrorism on the totalizing process i s
'-idealistic, i f not finally a replay of doctrines of original sin in their worst religious sense"
(1 991 a: 401 -02). Eagleton wants us to ask ourselves why it is that "just at the historical
moment when the system was becoming more 'total' than ever some radical intellectuals
hegan to denounce the whole notion of totality as a bad dream" (1 997: 128). In the
previous chapter reference was made to Lyotard's efforts to identify all totalizing
thoughts and grand narratives that proposed human emancipation from the nightmare of
history with terrorism and totalitarianism. Lyotard was one of those earliest postmodern
theorists who opposed the notion of consensus for the sake of "differences" and for
"honoring the name." H e also gave the call for the war on totality. Darko Suvin,
explaining the strange origins of the connotations of the word totalitarianism, writes that
"[tlhey arose after the [Second World] war, propagated by the Congress of Cultural
Freedom" and "funded by the CIA" (1 988: 359).
It has been argued that Jarneson's logic of totali7ation homogenizes not just the
cultural universe of Western Europe but that of the Third World as well (Aijaz Ahmad
1 991 : 95-1 22, Neil T,arsen 1988: xix-xxi, Sean Homer 1998: 169-72). in order to see how
far these arguments are justified it is necessary to exmine Jameson's observations on the
Third World. First of all it has to he understood that in Jameson's language "third world"
includes '?hose inner colonized of the First World--- 'minorities', marginds, and women
--- fully as much as i ts external subjects and official 'natives'." Following Sartre's
"Preface" to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of lhe Eurth Jameson says that it was only during
the nineteen sixties that these "natives" became "human kings" ( I 988b: 1 8 1). It is true
that the majority of these natives were the decolonized new "subjects of history." But, as
Jameson rightly points out, "decolonization historically went hand in hand with
neocolonialism" meaning that one form of domination and exploitation was replaced by
another. Thus, liberation, very ambiguously, meant only the "separation" fmm an older
system of domination. Jameson says that it was "something like the replacement of the
British Empire by the IMF" and other newly constituted international financial/monetary
organizations. This "dialectical combination of decoloni~ation and neo-colonialism" i s
explained in terms of the technological revolution popdarly called Green Revolution
whose purpose it was to "free the world from hunger." Jameson argues that during the
modern period capitalist penetration of the Third World did not tamper with its traditional
modes of production which were mostly "leR intact" and "exploited by a more political
and military structure." But the Green Revolution carried "this penetration and expansion
of the 'logic of capital"' to a new stage wherein the older structure was "systematically
destroyed to he replaced by an industrial agricd ture" (1 98% 1 84-85). 'l'hc consequences
were, obviously, disastrous. Jameson writes:
The organic social relations of village societies are now shattered, an
enormous landless proletariat L'produced," which migrates to the urban
areas . . . while new, proletarian wage-working forms of agricultural labour
replaced the older collective or traditional kinds. Such [is the] ambiguous
liberation. ( 1 988b: 1 85)
With the globalization of capital, the opening of the markets of these areas and the
weakening of the national governments, to which reference has already been made, the
immiseration of the Third World has been more intense. Thus, Robert Young's argument,
to which Sean Homer refers, that Jarneson defines the Third World "solely in terms of its
experience of colonialism" and that it "simply reduplicates the history of European
colonialism" does not take these statements off meson into consideration (1 998: 64).
Criticisms that Jameson' s totalizing hypothesis tends to uniustifiably generalize
and thus suppress the plurality and diversity of 'Third World experiences and culture are
summed up by Perry Anderson thus:
The gravamen o f the charge against his theory is that it ignores or
suppresses practices in the periphery that not only cannot be
accommodated within the categories of the postmodem, but actively reject
them. For these critics, post-colonial culture is inherent1 y more
oppositional, and far more political than the postmodemism of the centre.
( 1 999: I 18)
The charges that Anderson refers to also do not take into consideration the emphatic
staternenis that Jameson has made in his discussion of Third World literature and other
cultural forms of the marginalized people. Jameson has categorically expressed his views
on the radical potential of the cultural products of those on the periphery in several of his
essays. t-le describes the third world as "the development of under-development" and says
that the United States has become "the biggest third world country, because of
unemployment, non-production, the flight of factories and so on" ( 1 988c: 17). Recause of
this unevenness in development which is inherent to the capitalist system he finds a
"strange coexistence" in contemporary America of "social worlds as rigidly divided from
each other as in a caste system" which he describes as the "permanent Third World
existence at the heart of the First World" (1977a: 852). In terms of statistical data and
their comparison with the third world countries which have more unemployment and
nonproduction and poverty this may seem somewhat exaggaated, hut there i s truth in
what he says, and especially of the cultural texts produced from the "internal" Third
World of the United States. "black women's literature or Chicano literature" ( 1 990b: 49).
He acknowledges the negative edge of the third world and the revolutionary potential of
their "collective subject, ¢ered but not schizophrenic" which emerges in many of the
cultural expressions of the marginalized (1 988c: 2 1). Jmeson also argues that the Third
World has to be looked at in a different way, "not merely because of decolonization and
political independence, but above all because these enormously varied cultures all now
speak in their own distinctive voices" (1990b: 48). He does not consider all of their
literatures to be so marginal that they can easily he overlooked. At least [,atin American
literature, he says, "has today become perhaps the principal player on the scene of world
cu~ture." and it has an undeniable effect and influence not only on other Third World
culture but on First World literature and culture as well (t990b: 48-9).
In the context of neocolonidism and the position of the 'Ihird World as the new
imperial subject's "other" it becomes imperative that some specific engagement with the
question of Third World literature be done. Jameson says that the "enormous variety" of
the Third World cultures is in ''various distinct ways locked in a life-and-death struggle
with First World cultural imperialism itself' that is "a reflection of the economic situation
of such areas in their penetration by various stages of capitalism" (1986a: 140). And
because of the dialectical relationship between them discussed above a study of the third
world culture "implies a new view of [the First World] from the outside" and "Third
World cultures offer a more unvarnished and challenging image of [the First World]"
( 1986a: 1 40). Third World cultures are examined "in the light of the Marxian concept o f
'modes ol' production"' and Jameson suggests that African culture exemplifies "the
symbiosis of capital and tribal societies;" China and India exhibit the "engagement o f
capitalism with the great empires of the so called Asiatic mode" while Latin America
involves "an earlier destruction of imperial systems" and "an indirect economic
penetration and control" which Asia and Africa had experienced on1 y afier decolonization
( I 986a: 141).
These are only the "initial distinctions" that Jameson makes. But the most
important and perhaps the most controversial statement that Jameson ha7 made on Third
World cuiture is his "sweeping hypothesis" that
All Third World texts are necessarily . . . allegorical and . . . they are to be
read as . . . national allegories . . . particularly when their forms develop
out of essentially Western machineries of representation. . . . Those texts
. . . project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story
of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled
situation of the public Third World cuhure and society. ( 1 986a: 141 -42)
Substantiating this claim Jameson offers a reading of the Chinese writer i,u Xun's works
and the Senegalese writer and film maker Ousmane Sembene's novel Xcclu and claims
that they suggest that "a literary article could be a political act with real consequences"
( 1 986a: 150). But the First World texts differ fiom these texts in that the former articulate
a "radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political,"
between "the domain of sexuality and the unconscious" and "the public world of classes,
the economic, and secular political power" ( I 986a: 1 4 1) .
Critics from the Third World have had difficulties in coming to terms with this
totalization of Jameson that tends to homogenize all Third World cultures despite
acknowledging their plurality. Aijaz Ahmad complains that Jameson's "ambitious
undertaking" of "the construction of 'a theory o f the cognitive aesthetics of third wodd
literature"' suppresses "the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both
the advanced capitalist countries on the one hand, and the imperialized formations on the
other" and argues that Jameson constructs "a binary opposition" of First and Third World
categories (1992: 95). Ahmad contends that there are "literary, cultural and political
pressures as well as an ideological conjuncture" in the posing of "a unitary category'' of
Third World literature (1992: 43). Theoretically no "internally coherent" Third World
literature can be constructed because it is epistemologically impossible to have such an
objec~. Ahmad's argument is that "major literary traditions" of Thircl World countries in
Asia and Africa remain unknown to the First World and in such a situation the
formulation of a "cognitive theory" of third-world literature on the basis of the scantly
available data is "an alarming undertaking." Jameson's conceptualization itself is
"central1 y grounded in a binary opposition between a First and a Third World." Recause it
is will well-nigh impossible to "speak of any fundamental differences within particular
national structures," differences of "class or of gender formations," .lameson is forced to
"minimize" and "absolutize" the differences between the First and the Third Worlds.
Since Jameson's definition of the Third World rests on "its 'experience of colonialism
and imperialism',"' the political category that follows from this is that of "'the nation'
with nationalism as the peculiarly valorized ideology." dameson's theory of "the 'national
allegory' as the metatext is thus inseparable from the larger Three Worlds Theory which
permeates" his text (1992: 92-8). Ahmad argues that analytically, Jameson's definition of
the Three Worlds in terms of their production systems "leaves the so-called Third World
in limbo" and it is unsure where the different Third World countries belong in Jameson's
system of binary opposition between the First and Third Worlds because Jameson's
classification "is empirically ungrounded in any facts" ( 1 992: 1 00-01 ).
Tn Jameson' s homogenization of the cultural differences the differences between
the First and the Third World are "absolutized as an Otherness, but the enormous cultural
heterogeneity of social formations within the so-called Third World is submerged within
a singular identity of experience," writes Ahmad (1 992: 104). Jameson's absolute locating
of capitalism and socialism in the First and Second Worlds respectively "freezes and
defiistoricizes the global space within which struggles between these great motivating
forces actually take place" (1992: t 05). The "emphatic insistence" of Jameson that
"nutioaa? experience is central to the cognitive formation of the Third World intellectual,'"
Ahmad says, slips into "a much wider and far less demarcated vocabulary of 'culture',
'society' [and] 'collectivity'." But, he asks, "[alre 'nation' and 'collectivity' the same
thing?'(l992: 109). He points out that even during the period when anticolonial
nationalist struggle was at its height there has not been a single novel in IIrdu which
directly or exclusively treats "the experience of colonialism and imperialism." This theme
is only "woven into many of these novels, but never in an exclusive or even a dominant
emphasis" (1 992: 1 1 8). In addition to these problems that Jameson's text betrays, it is
dubbed "gendered" and "determined by a certain racial milieu" ( 1992: 122).
R. Radhakrishnan also alleges that Jameson speaks "all too glibly about 'the return
of nationalism' in the Third World as though nationalism were enjoying a re-run in the
Third World." Sean Homer, complaining of Jameson's "sweeping over-generalking
statement," asks whether we can "really reduce the diversity and heterogeneity of all
Third World literature to examples of two writers" and on that basis "can we seriously
argue that Third World literature a l w ~ . s constitutes national allegories?' ( I 998: 63).
Homer argues that the category of the Third World plays "an ambiguous role in
Jameson's theorizing" and that it provides "a dialectical contrary to the First World as an
absent centre within postmodernism and as a sign of the final globalization of late
capitalism" (1 998: 64).
It has to be agreed that Jarneson's hypothesis on Third World culture has its
problems of overgeneralization and oversimplification. His method of totalizing, it has
already been pointed out, is a conscious political choice with the specific intention of
attempting to cognitively map the system. By this Jameson is not denying the individual
identity of the national traditions or the multiplicity of Third World culture. On the other
hand, he is calling for "an internationalization of national situations" and attempting to
formulate a new methodology for literary and cultural studies in which the new !-
internationalism is recognized (1987d: 22). Aijaz Ahmad and other critics do not seem to
take into consideration the tactical assumptions, the provisjonul nature, and the pedagogic
perspective of Jameson's views on l l i r d World literature. in the essay "State of the
Subject (111)" Jarneson argues that "one of the new tasks of the university system in the
First World is to come to terms with the immense richness of Third World cultures and
literatures . . . when, for better or for worse, the unification of the globe is [hecoming] a
reality" (1987d: 17). The Third world cultural documents are important not just fiom the
pedagogic perspective and in the new context of the globalization of capital but they are
also of crucial significance to the First World insofar as they may reveal "the dynamic of
dependence and resistance, exploitation and internal development" (Jameson 1 987d: 23).
Jameson's repeated assertion that his aim in the essay w a ~ not to propose any authentic
theory o f Third World culture but to imagine a 6'relational way of thinking about global
culture, so that we cannot henceforth think 'First World' literature in isolation from that
of other global spaces" seems to go unnoticed in the above mentioned criticisms
(Jarneson, quoted in Wise 1994: 186). fameson also says that "the vitality of a certain
nationalism" has to be respected and we have to be "attentive to the structural and
historical difference of national situation of other cultures" (1 987d: 25). The "relational
way of thinking" is a methodology in which the First World is "'compared and relativized
along with everyone else" (Jarneson 1 987d: 25).
Acknowledging that Jameson's approach to Third World culture is "nut without
its failings and insufficiencies" Christopher Wise asserts that his "theoretical position has
both pragmatic and epistemological value in both the First and the Third Worlds." It is
valuable for its "illuminating insight" and i t s "liberating potential or for its ability to
motivate praxis that may contribute towards altering the most pressing issue of our time:
the systemic underdevelopment of the Third World" (Wise 1994: 174-5). Wise says that
Jameson's concern in the essay i s to "alert First World intellectuals, academics and critics
to their arrogance and blindness in neglecting Third World literature." His purpose, Wise
argues, is ro "promote the dissemination of Third World literature and to emphasize the
interrelatedness of world cultures" (1994: 188, n.15). Literary and cultural documents
from these widely divergent geographical regions are "intrinsically valuable for their own
communities'' but "as 'SO many structural variants of the development of national
capitalism"' they are much valuable to other regions as well. Jarnewt's attempt to
fbrmulate a "relational way of thinking about global culture" offers "a truly global (or
decentered) means of conceptualizing both the radical differences and identity of
contemporary human situations." This, Wise concludes, is not '"orientalidng' Third
World literature, as Ahmad charges," but "a practical and useful methodology" by which
the West is compared and relativized with all others (Wise 1994: 1 86). Aijaz h a d ' s
criticism, writes Wise, "distorts and caricatures" Jameson' s theoretical position and
suggests that he "adopts the persona of wounded and betrayed comrade, a rhetorical
strategy that is both offensive towards Jameson and patently unfair" (1 994: 174). The
charges of racialism and gender prejudices that Ahmad levels against Jameson can also be
considered as part of the distortion that Wise speaks about.
Jameson himself has said that tactically his intentions, in the essay, were "teaching
third world literatures; the recognition of the challenge they pose to even the most
advanced contemporary theory; the need for a rational way of thinking global culture . . .
a comparative study of cultural situations" (Jameson, quoted in Layoun 1990: 14). Mary
Layoun says that Jameson implies that the very division of First. Second and Third
Worlds has been a construct of "imperial power" and they have to be understood as
"examples of Edward Said's 'imaginary geography"' (1 990: 14). Jarneson realizes that in
the postmodern conditions the new imperial master's "view from the top is
epistemologically crippling" and, hence, the aim of his provisional hypothesis i s to make
the First World realize this and to make it confront with the daily reality of the other two-
thirds of the globe ( 1986a: 1 58). This seems to be in keeping with Ngugi wa 'I'hiong'o's
call to the Western writer to
expose to his European audience the naked reality of the relationship
between Europe and the Third World. He has to show to his European
reader that, to paraphrase Rrecht, the water he drinks is often taken from
the mouths of the thirsty in the Third World and the food he eats is
snatched from the mouths of the hungry in Asia, Africa and South
America. (quoted in Gugelberger 199 1 : 505).
This is exactly what Jameson means when he says, using the Hegelian metaphor of the
Master-Slave relationship, that "the Slave is called upon to labour for the Master and to
furnish him with all the material benefits befitting his supremacy" ( 1 986a: 1 58) . 'l'he
"greatest misfortune" that has happened to the Third World societies, he says, has been
the discovery of vact oil resources because it has been "something which. far from
representing salvation . . . sinks them incalculably into a sea of foreign debts they can
ncver dream of liquidating." Jameson observes that contemporary experiences in Third
World societies can be characterized as "'cultural imperialism', a faceless influence
without representable agents, whose literary expression seems to demand the invention of
new forms" ( 1 986a: 1 53-4).
Ti is Sameson's contention that only the Third World knows what the reality of
History is, what the "nightmare of history" is, and, hence the First World has to realize
what the limitations of its perspective from the top are and accordingly it has to
acknowledge "the epistemological priority" of the aIlegorical vision of 'll-rird World
literature ( 1 986a: 158). It is based on this unique capacity of Third World literatures to
represent reality and their expressive themati~ation of the political that Jarneson describes
them as "situational" and "rnaterialistn(l 986a: 157). Each individual story thus becomes
the expression of the collectivity itself. Jameson emphasizes that in 'nird World texts we
have an inversion of this: in them "libidinal investment" is to be read in "primarily
political and social terms" and it is based on this relationship which shapes the cultural
forms that he says that Third World cultural documents can be read as national allegories
( 1 986a: 144). He argues that "in nonhegemonic situations, or in situations of economic or
cultural subalternity. there tends to he a reference to the national situation that is always
present and always t l t in a way that it cannot be in the dominant culture of the
superstate" (1988~: 26). The relationship between "the libidinal and the political
components of the individual and social experience" in the First World i s articulated in
their cultural documents where "po~itical commitment is recontained and psychologized
or subjectivized by way of the public-private split" ( I 986a: 144).
In the Indian context that he invokes Aijaz Ahrnad does not find any Urdu novel
in which there is an exclusive treatment of the experiences of colonial domination or
national liberation movement. But he agrees that these experiences are "woven into"
many Urdu novels and that there are short stories in the Urdu language that directly deal
with these subjects. Ahmad also finds it difficult to point out a fictional narrative in Urdu
where the "issue of coIonialism or the difficulty of a civilizational encounter between the
English and the Indian has the same primacy" as in Passage to India or The Raj Quarter
(1992: 118). To insist that these experiences of colonialism and nationalism need to be
treated exclusively in fiction so as to be read as narrating the nation is asking too much.
But. to go by the spirit of Aijaz Ahmad's own argument, the nation i s not narrated by the
Urdu language alone. K. Satchidanandan, writing on the concept of a national culture and
an Indian literature, points out that the nationalist consciousness is very much there in the
Bengali, Hindi. Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Punjabi, and Malayalam literatures of the 1 930s and
1940s. To establish his point he quotes Frantz Fanon's observation that a "nationd culture
is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify
and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in
existence" (1999: 25) . Satchidanandan says that Rabindranath 'Tagore's "paradigmatic
text" Gorct illustrates this best. Ti deals with the encounter between the modern British and
the traditional Indian culture and calls for "a synthesis of modem values and traditional
culture." It "sets the agenda for those who wish to fight colonialism" by presenting the
protagonist Gora's rebellion to dislocate the colonial system. (Satchidanandan 1999: 23-
26). The Malayalam writer Chandu Menon's novel Indulekha written in 1889 can be
described as one which discusses social issues generated by the encounter between
English and the culture of Kerala. The Punjabi writer Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid's novels Ik
Sikh Ghrirunu, Sukhi Parivar, Sresht KuEan di Chul, Sushi2 fidhwu, ,Tubhug Kuur and
Dampuli Pyur are all concerned with the problems "typical of the cultural duality
engendered by British rule" (Sekhon and Duggal 1992: 240). It can also be pointed out, in
Sameson's defence, that among the Third World countries "nationalism" and "global
American post-modemist culture" have been the most common denominators, more
common than the "other choice" of "join[ing] the 'Second World'," as A i j a Ahmad has
indicated (1 999: 101). It was in the period between 1 955-75 that most o f the Third World
countries through their nationalist movements liberated themselves from the colonial
yoke and the llnited States established its global hegemony in the post-war geopolitical
scenario. Aijaz Ahmad himself says that it was during the post-war years and as a
"contradictory consequence of decolonization" that all "zones of capital" were integrated
into a single global market "entirely dominated by this supreme imperialist power" (1992:
2 1 ). Jameson's emphasis all through his analysis of postmodernism has been on this very
globalization of capital, the dominant role of the United States in the process and the
consequences of the penetration of capital into those hitherto precapitalist geographical
areas. And that is precisely the reason why he describes postmodernism as "the cultural
logic of late capitalism."
Ai-jm Ahmad himself ha7 written about '?he unstoppable dynamic of
decolonization" throughout ,Asia and Africa and the "dynamic of an anticolonial struggle"
during the post-war years, all the while insisting that the process of decolonization was
"no uniform matter." He also says that it was this period which saw the "emergence of the
United States" as "the hegemonic capitalist power" ( 1 992: 1 8-2 1 ), Jameson's essay on
Third World literature, writes Burnharn, is "the site for massive insecurity, not case of
assertion: insecurity with the US hegemony, with the institutions of the academy, with the
status of First World i ntcllectuals" (1 995: 1 56). Regarding the nature of the anticolonial
nationalist movements in the Afro-Asian region, no one would argue that there was
uniformity in these struggles. Jameson does not invoke nationalism rn a uniform category.
Aijm Ahmd spe& of "many different kinds of ideologies and political practices"
involved in nationalism and the distinction between "progressive and retrograde kinds of
practices" of nationalism (1 992: 7). Jameson, quoting Tom Nairn, points to "the existence
of two brands of nationalism, one healthy, and one morbid" and suggests that "[bloth
progress and regress are inscribed in its genetic code from the start" (1 981 a: 298). But,
despite the variety of interests involved in the nationalist struggles, what makes it possible
for classifying them a an operational category is their anticolonial nature. In the case of
the Indian subcontinent itself, no well meaning historian would equate the interests that
led to the formation of India and Pakistan; but the fact remains that the two new nations
were decolonized as a result of the same anticolonial struggle led by the nationalist
movement which had the participation of almost all sections o f society with varying
interests. and that the people of the two territorial regions had experienced the same
colonial supremacy and exploitation. So is the case of African and Latin American
nations which were colonized by different European powers who had different kinds of
interests in their respective colonies. That the national leaderships of these states could
not keep these forces together for long afier decolonization is a different matter
altogether. The interests of the British Imperial power were different in its colonies spread
across the world and these interests were antagonistic to French or Spanish or Portuguese
or Dutch interests in their colonies. In other words, each territory was colonized by the
European powers for different reasons. But, the fact remains that they were colonies
exploited by the colonizer at different historical conjunctures. These differing interests of
the various colonizers at different historical moments and the experiences of the
colonized are designated colonial interests and colonial experiences respectively. And,
common to the colonial experience all over the world was oppression and exploitation---
political, economic, social and cultural: an experience of suhalternity. Jameson's
emphasis, obviously, is on the "collective energies" of nationalism which successhUy
overthrew the colonial powers, and, this has to be the progressive form of nationalism. He
warns that "a Left which cannot grasp the immense Utopian appeal of nationalism ... can
scarcely hope to 'reappropriate' such collective energies and must effectively doom itself
to political impotence" ( 1 98 1 a: 298).
Radhakrishnan's view that LLhistorically 'nationalism' is new to the 'I'hird World"
does not seem to take history into consideration, at least in the case of India. Even before
India attained nationhood there had been an Indian literature and an Indian culture that
transcended linguistic and regional boundaries and shared the same values, traditions,
heritage, myths, experiences and concerns. But this is not to suggest that Indian culture
and literature are monolithic formations unified by these shared values and concerns.
What is suggested is that despite the innumerable diversities that demarcate and identify
each region there are certain vibrant things common to dl of them that make them part of
a pan-Indian unity. ?'he logic of the issue of the heterogeneity of Third World culture that
Radhakrishnan and Aijaz Ahmad raise can be used in the case of the concept of First
World culture as well. But, as Gugelberger says. it i s also to be understood that Jameson
uses "Third World literature" only as "an operational term" (1 994: 5 1 7). Radhakrishnan
comments that the "allegorical lenses through which [Jameson] perceives the Third World
will not let him see the devastation brought about by Western imperialism and
colonialism" (1 989: 329, n.2). This, to say the least, reflects Radhakrishnan's own failure
to properly understand the Jamesonian text. .Tameson's works are permeated with his
thoughts and observations on the devastation inflicted by capitalism not just on any
specific geographical region of the world but to the whole of humanity at various stages
of its development. His essays on postmodemism dwell at length on the devastation
caused by capitalist penetration in the Third World also, details of' which have been
discussed earlier. Jameson has defined national allegory
as a formal attempt to bridge the increasing gap between the existing data
of everyday life within a given nation-state and the structural tendency of
monopoly capital to develop on a world wide scale. essentially
transnational scale. . . . [E,]ike any form it must be read as an instable and
provisory solution to an aesthetic dilemma which is itself the manifestation
of a social and historical contradiction. ( 1 979a: 94)
In his essays on postmodernism as well as in the one on Third World literature it has been
Jameson's consistent effort to explain how capitalist penetration has been responsible for
this contradiction. And Jarneson's purpose, contradictory to what these critics allege as
the integration of Third World literature into the Western canon, is "to identify 'with the
wretched of the earth'" and "to learn from the 'I'hird world writer how to look into what is
really going on in the world" and also "to try to end colonialism and neocolonialism,
political and mental" (Gugelberger 1994: 506). Through this reality of the "tangible
medium of daily life" in the Third World in its "vivid and experiential w a y s ' b e sense
"the abstract truth of class" which makes possible genuine class consciousness, and, in the
Third World narratives the classes "become in some sense characters in their own right."
This is the sense, Jameson says, in which the term allegory is to be taken as "a working
hypothesis" (1 992a: 38).
Georg Gugelberger draws attention to a very crucial distinction upon which all
literature is to he defined. He says that literature has to be evaluated on the basis of
questions like "By whom?", "For whom?'and '"gainst whom?" If we accept this
proposition, a writer like Jorge Luis Borges cannot be considered a Third World writer
because his work belongs to the established Western canon, whereas Pablo Neruda is
"obviously a Third World writer." Thus, he writes, "Third World" is an "operational
rather than analytical" category in fameson's use. Gugelberger refers to Peter Nazareth's
Fanonian definition of the Third World which describes it as "an identity with the
wretched of the earth" irrespective of geographical, gender and racial criteria, an identity
"to determine to end a11 exploitation and oppression." This definition foregrounds the
"political message" in all genuine Third World literature which often "tends to he
allegorical and didactic." Referring to Barbara Harlow's observation associating Third
World literature with "the theme of resistance, with the conscious formation of a counter-
hegemonic discourse" and to her theory of an "organization of literary categories which is
'participatory' in the historical processes of hegemony and resistance to domination,"
Gugelberger says that '%her term resistance lirerature is a more concrete designation for
Third Wodd 1,iterature." He comes to the conclusion that "all genuine Third World
Literature fights for the expulsion of all forms of colonialism and dependency and
therefore truly is resistance literature" and that "liberation can be considered the authentic
theme of all true Third World Literature" ( I 994: 508- 14).
dameson has faith in the radical potential of this marginalized literature. In
"Reificati on and Utopia in Mass Culture" he writes:
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 roman quebecois, the literature of
the Third World; and this production is possible only to the degree to
which these foms of collective life or colIective solidarity have not yet
been fully penetrated by the market and by the commodity system. (1992a:
23 -24)
Jameson's concern implied in this and other observations on Third World literature
referred to above is the class prejudices of canonized Western literature in which is
echoed the voice of the hegemonic European White Male. The canonized "cultural
monuments and traces of the past," Sameson says, are all "profoundly ideological" with
"vested interests in and a functional relationship to social formations based on violence
and exploitation." A Marxist hermeneutics has to restore the meaning of the cultural
forms, a process which "cannot be separated from a passionate and partisan assessment of
everything that is oppressive in them and that knows complicity with privilege and
domination" (198Ta: 299). Any real historical analysis of cultural forms has to unearth
and re-create the voices of the marginalized sections of society, the voices of resistance
which are strafegically contained in these very forms. This re-creation has tcl he done in
the light of their real historical material conditions evidences of which will he available in
those cultural texts. When this re-creation is done from a sociological perspective what
we have is a kind of "re-discovery" of something that has been alienated or marginalized
in the past. It i s not difficult to understand that this is exactly what happens in the much
celebrated and commercially organized national and intemationai "cultural festivals"
where many specimens of these marginalized cultural forms are exhibited. Divested of
their social and historical conditions they remain mere reified, mediatized images meant
to be commercially consumed by aesthetic consumers. This is also part o f the strategies of
containment adopted by the legitimating process of the hegernonic capitalist ideology in
which the voices of resistance are coopted into the capitalist system and silenced.
Jarneson's exercise in the attempted theorization of Third World literature
functions as a warning against suck strategies of containment. It is not that he does not
recognize or is unwilling to acknowledge the cultural potential of the differential histories
of Third World countries. That is why he agrees with Roberto Retamer's
"internationalization of national situations" (1989~: xi). Th is internationalization is not a
process of totalization which subsumes and destroys the differences of or within nations.
The very articulation of the cultural differences of the Third World that Jameson
undertakes is a dialectical process o f recognizing and questioning the Other. Jameson
observes that in Retamer's intemationatixation the Third World (as the marginalized) is
not being subsumed into a "homogeneous Other of the West" nor does he "vacuously
celebrate the astonishing pluralism of human cultures" ( 1 9 8 7 ~ : xi-xii). He says that "we
want something like a new internationalism" which is not monolithic but which "must
undo the temptation of isolationism and specialization." Within this internationalism he
respects "the vitality of a certain nationalism." Jameson's prnposal of this new "cultural
internationalism" is "an internationalism of national situations" that primarily attends to
"the structural and historical difference of national situations of other countries" (1987d:
24-5). Jameson's own essay on Third World culture can be considered as an attempt to
internationalize Third World national situations in the new postmodern situation created
by the globalization of capital. His observation that "the view from the top is
epistemologically crippling" is itself an acknowledgement of the lopsided perspective of
the Western canon which needs to be reformulated in the light of such a knowledge
(1 986a: 1 58) .
A11 said and done, there are problems in Jameson's hypothetical assessment of
Third World culture. The argument that 'Third World cultural texts are material is rather
weak and contradicts its own spirit when Jameson attempts to discover a metaphysical
subjectivity that transcends all boundaries and is common to all Third World. Rut the
metacriticism that Jameson recommends is a reminder to the Western world of the
weaknesses of its own canon. It advises the First World to be responsible for its nwn
lopsided views on culture and aesthetics and "seeks to cany out the political task of
educating the American public" (Burnham 1995: 155). Jameson compels the West not
only to acknowledge the identity of Third World culture but also to understand the social
reality around the world from the cultural texts of the Third World. Obviousiy, this
suggestion of Jameson has the definite political purpose of assisting the development of a
class consciousness potent enough to give concrete form to a global praxis to successfully
resist the hegemonic forces of postmodemism. He is convinced that only a collective
subject will be able to perform this task and thus be the agent of history. Rut this cannot
be the fragmented schizophrenic subject of the West and simultaneously it has to be
decentered as well. And, it is this decentered collective subject that he finds in Third
W o l d narratives. Tn an interview with Anders Stepbanson Jameson speaks about a
coilective, decentered subject that emerges in some forms of storytelling in Third World
literature. "neither personal in the modernist sense nor depersonalized in the pathological
sense of the schizoid text." He explains that the subject is decentered because the stories
you narrate as an individual subject "don't belong to you. You don't control them the way
the master sub+ject of modernism would" (1988~: 21). It is such a decentered collective
subject that can perform the role of the historical agent potent enough lo challenge the
capitalist hegemony. Thus, it is the allegoriaation of various subject positions that we find
in such cultural texts. John Hoppe observes that Edward Barthwaite's "overt concern" for
representing "the historical trajectory of his people" simply reinforces Jmeson's point
about allegory which i s "not a choice" but "a constitutive element of 'Third World
literature." Thus Third World culture and literature can justifiably be considered '%he
reflection of a people's struggle---the primary economic and ideological struggle brought
to Ihe level of figure and language" (Hoppe 1992: 93-4). John McGowan says that
Jameson has to be "emulated" rather than "chastised" for his "resolute retention of the
image of collective action and the necessity o f interpreting both the possibility of action
and its appropriate strategies on the basis of a theoretical attempt to comprehend the
social whole" (1 991 : 1 58).
It has already been pointed out that with the globalization of capital, the market
penetration of popular culture accelerated by the media, and the neo-imprialist
domination, the Third World, though decolonized, has now come under the direct
influence nf capitalism. This i s true in the case of those countries which were never
colonized and also in the case of those Latin American regions which were decolonized
much earlier. It is not without taking this historical situation into consideration that
Jameson speaks about postmodernism and "the coming into being of a global culture,"
and "the central phenomenon of cultural imperiaiism." He has no doubt that "it is global
capitalism which is responsible for the unification of global culture" (1987d: 23-4). This
"neoimperial domination," Perry Anderson says, i s no longer based on military force but
on "forms of ideological consent" (1999: 120). Based on these arguments objections to
Jarneson's theory of a global dominance of postmodemism, like the one raised by Aijaz
Ahmad can be dismissed. He says that "in India there is no postmodernism. The truth is
that there is not even modernity." He points out that in India where even the minimum
conditions of modernity have not been fulfilled, where modernization itself is still only a
distant possibility thew is no sense in speaking about postmodmisrn (1996: 18). But
Jarneson never argues that late capitalism has created a homogeneous situation where we
have the same socioeconomic conditions all over the world. Rather, he has consistently
emphasized the lopsided development of capital and has insisted that this unevenness is
inherent to the system. And, it is precisely to highlight this that he uses the concept of
"modes of production." In the contemporary world where l iberali~ation and deregulation
have opened the markets for capitalist penetration, and, telecammunications systems and
media have facilitated incredibly greater degree of cultural penetration, the impact of
capital i s more on the Third World than on the advanced societies. There is no need to say
that this impact is absolutely negative on the huge majority of the people there. This is
precisely the reason why Jameson calls for the development of genuine class
consciousness and collective resistance against the forces of the global hegemony of the
postmodern.