Criticism: A Political Issue

Abstract: This piece is about how I would like to remember Fredric Jameson, on personal and professional grounds. It tells the story of how I first met him and began to grasp his unique way of practicing cultural criticism, even at the most prosaic of levels. In his hands, cultural criticism became an exciting mode of learning the ways of the world. I argue that Jameson's work opened up a productive new way of reading artistic forms as materializations of social and historical forces. He transformed cultural criticism—most often a merely evaluative exercise—into a means of discovering and interpreting social reality, thus demonstrating the political potentiality of Theory. He gave us the critical weapons to engage in the discursive struggles that are inevitable in a society swarmed in contradictions thus giving continuity to the tradition of Western Marxism in their endeavors to elevate the historical present to thought.