Jameson

--- It's Jason, naturally thrilled, for The Grice Club ---

Here is a sample from The Political Unconscious:

"Mechanical causality is thus less a concept which might be evaluated on its own terms, than one of the various laws and subsystems of our peculiarly reified social and cultural life. Nor is its occasional experience without benefit for the cultural critic, for whom the scandal of the extrinsic comes as a salutary reminder of the ultimately material base of cultural production, and of the 'determination of consciousness by social being.'
It must therefore be objected, to Althusser's ideological analysis of the 'concept' of mechanical causality, that this unsatisfactory category is not merely a form of false consciousness or error, but also a symptom of objective contradictions that are still with us. This said, it is also clear that that it is the second form of efficacy Althusser enumerates, so-called 'expressive causality,' which is the polemic heart of his argument as well as the more vital issue (and burning temptation) in cultural criticism today. The conter-slogan of 'totalization' cannot be the immediate response to Althusser's critique of 'expressive causality,' if for no other reason that totalization is itself numbered among the approaches stigmatized by this term, which range from the various conceptions of the world-views or period styles of a given historical moment (Taine, Riegl, Spengler, Goldmann) all the way to contemporary structural or post-structural efforts at modelling the dominant episteme of sign-system of this or that historical period, as in Foucault, Deleuze-Gattari, Yurii Lottman, or the theorists of the consumer society (most notably Jean Baudrillard).

---

One observation - The word "Althusser" appears as a basic warning system in critical texts that what is to follow will be largely indigestible.