The death has been announced of Frederic Jameson (1934-2024) one of the best known and most interesting Marxist theorists of our time.
Jameson’s work was focused very much on the literary but in noting this the socialist historian E P Thompson (1924-1983) started out in this area and wrote aside from history poetry and a novel.
In reviewing the cultural logic of late capitalism in New Left Review in 1984, Jameson argued that if the times had moved beyond modernism one way of seeing things was Guy DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle where everything had been reduced to images. Images that were commercially available, a form of commodity fetishism.
In one passage he touched on what this might mean for history
Of course there is a deal of truth in this. Historical images are used to sell things rather than help understanding of the past to inform the present. Fortunately as E P Thompson might well have noted had he not died shortly before the piece appeared, historical research does continue. The battle for the past continues.
The work of Frederic Jameson and E P Thompson in their various ways remains indispensable in the present day
The past is thereby itself modified: what was once, in the historical novel as Lukács defines it, the organic genealogy of the bourgeois collective project—what is still, for the redemptive historiography of an E. P. Thompson or of American ‘oral history’, for the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations, the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future—has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum. Guy Debord’s powerful slogan is now even more apt for the ‘prehistory’ of a society bereft of all historicity, whose own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles. In faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.
Frederic Jameson Post Modernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism New Left Review 1/146 July/August 1984
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