Ian Buchanan

Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism

Fredric Jameson is one of the most influential literary and cultural critics writing today. He is a theoretical innovator whose ideas about the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences. Bringing together ten interviews conducted between 1982 and 2005, Jameson on Jameson is a compellingly candid introduction to his thought for those new to it, and a rich source of illumination and clarification for those seeking deeper understanding. Jameson discusses his intellectual and political preoccupations, most prominently his commitment to Marxism as a way of critiquing capitalism and the culture it has engendered. He explains many of his key concepts, including postmodernism, the dialectic, metacommentary, the political unconscious, the utopian, cognitive mapping, and spatialization. Jameson on Jameson displays Jameson’s extraordinary grasp of contemporary culture—architecture, art, cinema, literature, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and urban geography—as well as the challenge that the geographic reach of his thinking poses to the Eurocentricity of the West. Conducted by accomplished scholars from United States, Egypt, Korea, China, Sweden, and England, the interviews elicit Jameson’s reflections on the broad international significance of his ideas and their applicability and implications in different cultural and political contexts, including the present phase of globalization. The volume includes an introduction by Jameson and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications in all languages. Interviewers Mona Abousenna Abbas Al-Tonsi Srinivas Aravamudan Jonathan Culler Sara Danius Leonard Green Sabry Hafez Stuart Hall Stefan Jonsson Ranjana Khanna Richard Klein Horacio Machin Paik Nak-chung Michael Speaks Anders Stephanson Xudong Zhang

Introduction: Michel de Certeau--in the Plural

Every so often it becomes necessary to try to find the means of rescuing perception from the blind fatalisms of orthodoxy. In , for instance, Jean-François Lyotard, having grown tired of the incessant debates over the proper way to read Marx, announced that it was high time for a whole new way of reading him, one that owed nothing to previous attempts. Somehow, Marx had to be read differently, from the perspective of consumption, not production. As such, it wasn’t just a correction of existing interpretations that Lyotard sought but an end to an entire mode of interpreting Marx and the creation of a fresh means of engaging with his texts. ‘‘We must come to take Marx as if he were a writer, an author full of affects,’’ and so ‘‘take his text as a madness and not as a theory.’’ This would mean treating him as ‘‘a work of art’’ infused with ‘‘the desire named Marx.’’ 1 Clearly enough, Lyotard’s proposed reading strategy is stimulatingly antidogmatic and irrev-

Deleuze and popular music, or, why is there so much 80s music on the radio today?

This paper examines the possibility of using Deleuzes work to analyse popular culture, noting that he himself had little or no time for the subject. The particular area of interest is nostalgia and popular music. What the paper sets outs to explain using a Deleuzian apparatus is why it is people want to listen to the same song over and over again. It suggests that one answer to this can be found in Deleuzes notion of the refrain.

February 13, 2008, or the baleful enchantments of an apology

This essay argues that the 2006 Ray Lawrence film Jindabyne can be read as a national allegory (in Fredric Jameson’s sense of the word) for the cultural politics of the national apology to the indigenous people of Australia made by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It argues that the film portrays the cultural politics of that apology as both fraught and ambivalent.

The spectacle of war : security, legitimacy and profit post-9/11

On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, Martha Raddatz from ABC’s Good Morning America interviewed Vice President Cheney about progress in the war. The result was one of the most stunning admissions in recent memory of the irrelevance of ‘the people’ to the political process, particularly as it concerns war.