The political Unconscious

When I first read the chapter on the political unconscious by Fredric Jameson I felt like it was a bit over my head. The reading is very thick and the author has a very intellectual vocabulary, when I slowed down and focused on each individual paragraph I found that the author had a very interesting message. Now I had to really concentrate and I may have got this wrong but what had everything to do with language. According to the author the political climate of a capitalist society is constantly changing and with the changing political climate comes a changing political unconsciousness. Political unconsciousness, or what I believe to be political unconsciousness, is the current view of what is good and what is bad. The political unconsciousness shapes the way we think about things and the language we use. By shaping the language it shapes how we think about anything. How is that so? When people think they think in their language, that is how they describe it and process what is going on around them and therefore the language controls thought.

The author stresses the importance of history and historicizing. It is important to keep track of history but the problem the author has is how history should be recorded. It is a common belief that history should be recorded and researched in the most objective of ways. That means no opinions and no romanticism. The words of text books and other such scientific writings should be the means in which we see our past and preserve it. However, Jameson has a problem with that. His problem arises from his previous conclusions that language is shaped by the political unconsciousness.

If the political unconsciousness shapes the way we speak and think and the political unconscious is in constant flux due to the ever changing capitalist society than the language used to describe any sort of event would reflect the values of the society from which it was described in. The problem with that is the events described are presented as fact and completely objective and no one gives a second thought to the societal bias in which the events were written. If the political unconscious which the writings reflect is ignored than later generations or societies who read the historical texts of previous generations will have a skewed view of the past and not even realize it.

If recording the texts scientifically and without emotion is flawed and will indeed cause variations in the factuality of history than what can society look to for the best view of history and historical societies? The author suggests looking away from the “facts” and to stop shunning emotion but embrace emotion, embrace romanticism, and look toward literature. Literature, even if fictional, allows the reader to connect with the author and really experience what life was like in these dead societies. Literature gets into the mind of the author and the reader can than imagine how the author was thinking and more importantly, how the people of his society thought. Literature is also important because it lets the reader move past how individuals felt and thought and move on to how society worked as a whole. The literature tells stories that are fictional, but it let’s the reader know how the society of the time would of reacted to said stories and/or events. With the reader being able to understand why things happened in history it gives than a better understanding of what happened which then in turn gives them a less bias view of the past.