Political Unconsciousness

This chapter on political unconsciousness by Fredryk Jameson was interesting yet a bit hard to grasp. The writing style was meant for a reader with a large vocabulary which made it hard to simply pick up and read. I had to read many of the paragraphs more than once in order to try to understand what the author is talking about. Like most soc concepts, to understanding of political unconscious one must break a large idea into smaller more complex ideas. This chapter brings back Marx theories which I have always found quite complex and harder to read.

The chapter focuses on capitalist society. The capitalist society is constantly changing, and when the politics of that society changes the political unconsciousness changes as well. The political unconsciousness shapes the way we think and our language. Our thoughts and language changes through political unconsciousness as the values in a given society changes.

The central theme of The Political Unconsciousness is to historicize narratives and to understand them within the framework of Marx theories. Jameson does this by deciphering the difference between studying to nature of the ‘objective’ structures of a cultural text and studying it by interpreting categories or codes through which we read and receive the text in question. Most people don’t question text, you study a text book and you learn it. But Jameson goes deeper and argues that the object of study is less the text itself than the interpretations though which we attempt to confront and appropriate it. The political unconsciousness is a complex study of analysis to explore multiple paths that help us understand culture as symbolic acts.