Jameson the Bricoleur? Or the Strange Systematicity of the Dialectic

Abstract: This essay argues for the value of Jameson's approach to the dialectic. Jameson is sometimes accused of being eclectic, or what Claude Levi-Strauss would describe as a bricoleur. The essay argues that this is only partially true. Jameson is paradoxically both a systematic thinker and a bricoleur. He is systematic in his dialectical thinking, but that thinking is always open to new content, whether historical, theoretical or formal. He borrows regularly from systems that initially seem opposed to his position, but he enfolds them into the larger movement of the dialectic. This movement enables Jameson to theorize beyond ethical binaries (on which much criticism and theory remain fixated) to produce a metacommentary on the very limits of binary thinking. The ethical returns in Jameson's system, but only at the final level of the mode of production. It is this Marxist system (a fundamentally open system) that the essay elaborates.