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He Called It “Utopia”: The Transhumanism of Jameson & Aurobindo

This paper seeks to foreground an understanding of Fredric Jameson as a thinker of collective intelligence. I believe this approach to Jameson is radically different from the usual discussion of him as a Marxist literary and cultural critic and, moreover, highlights some of the rather odd aspects of his writing, especially when his entire body of work is studied as a whole. Specifically, I am going to discuss the role of the concept of “the political” and “the social” in his work and how these two concepts (differing names for the same thing) point towards a nascent understanding of collective intelligence. Additionally, I hope to address one of the common complaints against Jameson, namely that he depoliticizes the often very political field of Marxist literary and cultural criticism. In showing how and why this complaint is able to be mounted, I suggest that his discoveries about collective intelligence actually work at cross-purposes to his earlier commitments to political change. I conclude by discussing the work of Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, whose own understanding of collective intelligence often mirrors the model I find in Jameson. That said, Aurobindo’s access to the Vedic tradition affords him a better ability to move through the impasse that Jameson’s theories are stuck in.

Much of this work will hinge on Jameson’s 1991 book, Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism which documents the ever-changing realities of the cultural moment suggested by phrases like “post-industrial capitalism”. This book is a major turning point in Jameson’s entire career and, especially, in his theory of collective intelligence. Moreover, this work marks a departure from Jameson’s previous project. To explain this, I find it helpful to think of two major projects within Jameson’s immense body of work: roughly, from around 1961, with the publication of Sartre: The Origins of Style, to the publication of The Political Unconscious in 1981, we can make the claim that Jameson’s work more or less revolves around a project detailing the importance of a specific kind of Marxist theory. Then, in 1991, with the publication of Postmodernism, there is a methodological shift toward the detailing of the operation of the Utopian within the spaces of everyday life. It is also suggestive that this first, theory-based project, ends with a loose theory of collective intelligence.

When introducing his concept of the political unconscious, Jameson suggests the idea that various master narratives, themselves a reflection of a dominant mode of economic production, inscribe themselves on a text through a process of analogy. Marxist literary interpretation traces this political unconscious by tracing these inscriptions. What is most interesting about this practice, though, is that the political unconscious is explicitly coded as a collective unconscious: “such allegorical narrative signifieds are a persistent dimension of literary and cultural texts precisely because they reflect a fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality” Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious (: Cornell University Press, 1982), 34.. In this moment, we can see Jameson’s interpretive project taking shape along a specifically collective mode: Jameson is interested in discussing this political unconscious not so much for the fact that literary texts reflect the dominant mode of economic production, but because these texts reflect the collective dimension of our thought about such modes. This is why he suggests that history “is inaccessible to us except in textual form” Ibid., 35.. An interesting and important point to note here: this collective intelligence being glimpsed by Jameson is explicitly coded as political at this point and, more importantly, still largely coded in Marxist terms. As he moves into new theoretical methods, we shall see that this political dimension does not survive intact.

In an essay from 2004, “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?,” we see Jameson making a similar statement with a different vocabulary to the one above about our ability to access the collective dimensions of history. These changes in word choice detail some of the changes that happen to his thinking between the theory project and the Utopia project. Specifically, he writes: “literary forms (and cultural forms in general) are the most concrete symptoms we have of what is at work in that absent thing called the social” , 407.. It is interesting to note that we are still using literary texts to access some kind of cultural field, but the interesting switch between the 1981 quote and this one in 2004 is this field has changed from the politically charged field of history to something Jameson calls “the social.” This switch in terminology occurs around the same time as Jameson moves from focusing on Marxist theory to focusing on the everyday dimensions of the Utopian, which occurs between the writing of The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism. Jameson notes this change in the conclusion to Postmodernism, when he says that after his major Marxist/theoretical works, he was roused from a “canonical ‘dogmatic slumber’” and awoke to the new economic realities that undergird the postmodern Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (: Duke University Press, 1992), 399.. This awakening into the postmodern may begin to explain the changes between “the political” and “the social” in his vocabulary: while insisting that Postmodernism is vigorously Marxist (and having illustrated how his discussion in that book emerged from the work in The Political Unconscious), the analysis in Postmodernism doesn’t particularly resemble what we normally think of as Marxist criticism, especially given the fact that Postmodernism is stripped of the more classic Marxist vocabulary we see in the earlier works.

Additionally, Jameson’s claims about his own work have shifted. In Postmodernism, however, Jameson’s methodological claims famously shift to what he calls “cognitive mapping,” a process of exploration and experimentation that charts the various, overlapping realities of the postmodern media ecology. Can we then make a move to suggest that this process (similar to the work of literary analysis in The Political Unconscious) is also interested in the collective dimensions of this social that Jameson now seems so invested in? Perhaps. For Jameson, postmodern life is “a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed” which causes the “fragmented and schizophrenic decentering and dispersion of” the subject Ibid., 413.. Jameson follows these observations on subjects by discussing the problem of party politics in a world in which distance is increasingly irrelevant and then concludes the book. This feels inadequate, especially as it leaves the status of the individual (who might be juxtaposed against a collective in The Political Unconscious) in flux. Elsewhere in Postmodernism, Jameson suggests, in discussing the relationship between modernist literature and imperialism, that the recognition of the dependence of daily life in England on occurrences in places like India denatures the localness of everyday life; could something like this be happening to the subject itself under postmodernism? If so, is a de-centered subject not a form of collective intelligence? Jameson is unclear on this point, but I think it is beneficial to suggest the social, as Jameson discusses it, is a space of collective intelligence, a kind of collective unconscious that exceeds the collective historical character of the political in The Political Unconscious. The problem, in Jameson, though, with this understanding of the role of a collective intelligence in mediating the relationship between economic forces and cultural texts is that Jameson cannot figure out how to connect this insight into his revolutionary political machine.

One of the chief moments where we can see this breaking down is in the rather famous section of Postmodernism on the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. Essentially, the fragment concerns Jameson walking around the lobby of this hotel and discussing the way the space (and Jameson’s confusion in it) reflect the new cognitive and aesthetic demands of the postmodern. This becomes interesting when one looks at the scholarly response to this fragment. Ian Buchannon notes in his book Deleuzism, that, “upon finding [the hotel] far less astonishing and disorienting than Jameson depicts, critics seem to need to write back in anger, and bolstered by their own experiences of the building (which they take as objective proof of their point) they feel justified in doing so” [[reference:buchanandeleuzism:metacommentary2000 144]]. (It should be noted that this quote comes immediately after Buchannon’s own description of his visit to the Bonaventure). The interesting thing in this proliferation of field-trip-based rebuttals is that they are all based “on the assumption that the Bonaventure itself can be used to falsify Jameson’s claims” [[reference:buchanandeleuzism:metacommentary2000 144]].

Of course, despite the fact that the Westin Bonaventure contacted me through Twitter while I was reading Buchannon’s book, a building is not enough to rebut an argument. Moreover, as Buchannon points out, all of the arguments of Jameson and his respondents about the Bonaventure are, actually, based “not [on] the building itself as objective referent” but on their subjective experience of the hotel’s space [[reference:buchanandeleuzism:metacommentary2000 144]]. While this debate about the Bonaventure could point toward the problem of subjective experience in any hermeneutic operation, I think it specifically raises a problem with Jameson’s methodology during the Utopia phase of his work. If cognitive mapping is the key methodological insight for exploring the Utopian dimensions of popular culture, is this not an operation wholly driven by the subjective experience of the scholar as subject?

By countering Jameson’s argument about the Bonaventure with more and more divergent accounts of subjective experiences, this discussion gets no closer to any kind of “truth” about postmodern life or any closer to a kind of collective intelligence. What, then, is the possible upshot of cognitive mapping? Jameson, actually, answers this question in the opening of the fragment on the Bonaventure. Talking about the disorienting nature of the hotel’s lobby, he writes: “the newer architecture therefore … stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions” Ibid., 39.. This quote illustrates the problems with Jameson’s methodology during this project. The search for Utopia, cognitive mapping itself, is inherently driven by subjective experience of a world that offers nothing if not a simple imperative: “evolve!” This imperative towards self-overcoming, towards the transhuman, does not gel with Jameson’s continued interest in collective politics (we can see this becoming increasingly problematic in, for instance, his growing and unnamed interest in anarchism in works like Archaeologies of the Future). Does the subjective experience that points towards the collective intelligence of the social admit the kind of party politics of Marxism? This disjunction between the need for a critical subjective experience and the desire for collective revolutionary overcoming within the sphere of politics and economics is clearly a problem for Jameson, whose post-Postmodernism works have all dealt, more or less, with continuing to uncover the Utopian dimensions of everything, as if this project is nothing but an ongoing, unceasing, never-progressing act of cognitive mapping. If this is a dead end, what can be done?

At this point, we will turn to discussing the collective intelligence of the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo as a possible way out of the bind that Jameson’s Utopian project finds itself in. Aurobindo, as a youth, was involved in the early days of the Swaraj movement and is now widely credited with first having introduced the idea of home rule to the nationalist movement in India. After being tried under false charges of violence, Aurobindo retired from politics and spent the remainder of his life in his ashram in Pondicherry writing dense books of personal and cosmic philosophy. In a lengthy career as a writer, Aurobindo produced a number of works on collective intelligence, but the one most often mentioned as his masterpiece is The Life Divine, first published in serial form between 1914 and 1919. In it, Aurobindo lays out a theory of the human that, based on the Vedas, posits a field of collective being that he calls “the supramental.” We, as humans, have lost our awareness of this original unity through careful Yogic practice can regain access to this field. Additionally, Aurobindo borrows Bergson’s concept of “creative evolution” to suggest that collective being within the realm of the supramental is the evolutionary destiny of mankind. He writes:

These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are abnormal to humanity and only to be attained, in their organised entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression. To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination. Ghose, Aurobindo, The Life Divine (Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1977), 1.

This field of the supramental, an omnipresent mental oneness that can be discovered through self-practice and that is also the evolutionary destiny of the human race, appears to be very similar to Jameson’s understanding of Utopia and the social. In the work of cognitive mapping, the task, as Jameson has suggested, is to uncover the secret currents of the political unconscious at work in the cultural texts that contain symptoms of the social. In other words, in Jameson’s worldview, Utopia is always around us if we could only see, just as Aurobindo describes the supramental. As Aurobindo writes, this state beyond mind is the end goal of evolution:

the goal itself can only be reached by Mind passing beyond itself into that which is beyond Mind, since of That the Mind is only an inferior term and an instrument first for descent into form and individuality and secondly for reascension into that reality which the form embodies and the individuality represents. Therefore the perfect solution of the problem of Life is not likely to be realised by association, interchange and accommodations of love alone or through the law of the mind and the heart alone. It must come by a fourth status of life in which the eternal unity of the many is realised through the spirit. Ibid., 206..

So, in these two quotes, we can see that Aurobindo suggests that the practice of individual subjects, through the collective nature of Being, will ultimately lead to an inevitable collective enlightenment and a collective intelligence. Why, then does this movement not occur in Jameson. As a brief example, we may turn to Karl Marx in Das Kapital on the positive aspects of factory work: “when the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of the species” Marx, Karl, Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (: Penguin Classics, 1992), 447.. In Marxism, collective cooperation can yield collective enlightenment (through the advancement of the species), but not the work of the individual (a construction that Marx is highly suspicious of). So, in this way, we can begin to suggest that the individual, subjective practices of cognitive mapping are problematic for Jameson’s Marxism due to the overarching belief in collective cooperation as the key to advancing the species. This is perhaps why Jameson rejects the evolutionary imperative of the lobby of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel; this is why his project devolves into an endless cataloging of Utopia. Without recourse to the spiritual and, specifically, a discourse that suggests a way to move from a personal, subjective experience of collective intelligence, Jameson’s Utopia becomes stalled. By juxtaposing two very similar visions of collective intelligence in Sri Aurobindo and Fredric Jameson, we can begin to see a way out of the quagmire in which Jameson’s postmodern Marxist project finds itself stuck.