1
" The novel is... the anti-form proper to modernity itself (which is to say, of capitalism and its cultural and epistemological categories, its daily life). This means... that the novel is also a vehicle of creative destruction. Its function, in some properly capitalist ‘cultural revolution’, is the perpetual undoing of traditional narrative paradigms and their replacement, not by new paradigms, but by something radically different. To use Deleuzian language for a moment, modernity, capitalist modernity, is the moment of passage from codes to axioms, from meaningful sequences, or indeed, if you prefer, from meaning itself, to operational categories, to functions and rules; or, in yet another language, this time more historical and philosophical, it is the transition from metaphysics to epistemologies and pragmatisms, we might even say from content to form. "
― Fredric Jameson
6
" certain kinds of analyses -- like those of Karatani here -- are analogous to creative works themselves, insofar as they propose a schema which it is the reader's task to construct and to project out onto the night sky of the mind's eye; and this is in fact, I believe, the way in which a good deal of contemporary theory is read by artists, who do no in fact use such books primarily for their perceptive contributions to the analysis of this or that familiar work of art, the way and older criticism was appealed to by readers of belles lettres. These younger "postmodern" readers, as I understand it, look at the theoretical abstractions of post-contemporary books in order to imagine the concrete referents to which those abstractions might possibly apply -- whether those are artistic languages or experiences of daily life. Here, the analysis produces the absent text of what remains to be invented, rather than modestly following along behind the achieved masterpiece with a running commentary. It is -- to use the expression again -- science-fictional (as benefits a culture like ours, just catching up with science fiction, not merely in content, but in its form): the new abstractions model the forms of reality that does not net exist, but which it would be interesting to experience. "
― Fredric Jameson
13
" Nowhere is the hostility of the Anglo-American tradition toward the dialectical more apparent, however, than in the widespread notion that the style of these works is obscure and cumbersome, indigestible, abstract-or, to sum it all up in a convenient catchword, Germanic. It can be admitted that it does not conform to the canons of clear and fluid journalistic writing taught in the schools. But what if those ideals of clarity and simplicity have come to serve a very different ideological purpose, in our present context, from the one Descartes had in mind? What if, in this period of the overproduction of printed matter and the proliferation of methods of quick reading, they were intended to speed the reader across a sentence in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing, without suspecting that real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence? "
― Fredric Jameson
20
" Mi, u stvari, zamišljamo našu kulturu kao neki ogromni imaginarni muzej u kome su svi životni oblici i intelektualni stavovi podjednako dobrodošli da stoje jedan pored drugog, pod uslovom da su pristupačni samo za kontemplaciju. Tu bi tako, uporedo sa hrišćanskim misticima i anarhistima XIX veka, sa nadrealistima i renesansnim humanistima, bilo mesta i za neki marksizam koji bi bio samo jedan filozofski sistem među ostalima. Čak ni neki zahtev za apsolutnom verom ne bi smetao marksizmu da bude prihvaćen na taj način, jer u toj nama dobro poznatoj eklektičkoj tradiciji sasvim komotno koegzistiraju i same religije, pretvorene u slike. Ne, osobenost strukture istorijskog materijalizma leži u tome što on poriče autonomiju same misli, u tome što on, i sam misao, uporno dokazuje da čista misao funkcioniše kao prikriveni način društvenog ponašanja, u njegovom neugodnom podsećanju na materijalnu i istorijsku stvarnost duha. Tako marksizam, kao kulturni objekt, ustaje protiv kulturne aktivnosti uopšte, snižava joj vrednost i razgolićuje klasne privilegije i dokolicu, koji su preduslovi za uživanje u njoj. "
― Fredric Jameson , Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature
