Note: I wrote the following directly after my notes on fantasy. What follows covers a brief history of magic, literary influences, a few annotated entries on texts that informed my argument regarding the ideological work of magic, discussed in relation to Fredric Jameson's "Signatures of the Visible".

A Brief History of the Concept of "Magic"

While magic is often opposed to religion and science, it often includes forms of knowledge we now tend to think of as religious or scientific. For early Greeks, magic was coeval with science as an explanation for natural occurrences, and for later Greeks, such as Heraclitus, it was considered a psuedoscience less effective in the treatment of medical problems. In both cases, religion was an all-encompassing presence: a pervasive divinity was taken for granted, and it was not necessary to invoke it to explain specific causalities.

In Judaism, however, magic was negatively valued, because it was understood as an attempt to manipulate JHWH and so act against His divine will. It “condemn[ed] it as false religion not in the sense of its not producing empirical results but in the sense of being anathema to the Jewish people bound to YHWH by a special covenant” (Tambiah, 7). That is, to use magic was to abandon one's relationship as a Jew to God. Christianity went further by ascribing “magic” - indeed any form of religious practice that was not Christian - to Satanic influences, whereby individuals that used magic were not merely arrogantly abandoning or defying God, they were active forces of evil that brought harm upon others.

The Renaissance, by contrast, saw Western culture looking back to Greek and Roman forms as an ideal state that had existed before the stagnation of the middle Ages, and for those who “redisovered” the Hermetica, it meant a flourishing of magical forms, such as the Jewish cabala, gnosticism, Neoplatonism, the Hermetica, alchemy, astrology, Pythogoreanism, classical mystery religions, and a number of Eastern forms. Scholar magicians such as Marsilio Ficini, John Dee and Giordorno Bruno here engaged in magic to commune with God or other deities to transcend to other levels of spiritual consciousness. Yet scholar magicians wanted to disassociate themselves from the persistent charges of Christian heresy, and so relied upon a division between theurgic, or white magic, and goetic, or black magic. Their own theurgic magic, they argued, invoked natural and divine powers (“religion” as encompassing “magic”), while goetic magic (that of witchcraft, invocation of demons etc) was unnatural and profane (“religion” as excluding “magic).

Nonetheless, the real significance of the Renaissance magician is that he

changed the will of man, and conveyed to him the motivation that “it was now dignified and important for man to operate,” that “it was also religious and not contrary to the will of God that man, the great miracle, should exert his power” (Tambiah, 29).

The effects of such a perspective was evident after the Reformation. Protestents believed - as did many magicians - that men should assert their will for the glory of God. The difference was that while f igures such as Paracelsus and Newton thought that God had given man magic as well as science to understand Nature, science (which had already begun to develop out of magical practices such as alchemy and astronomy) was beginning to take precedence. In the process, the transformation of Nature beneath Man's efforts, indeed any signifier of Man's power and status in the cosmos, was understood as evidence of God's glory. The legitimation of science as a means to manipulate the world meant that magic (once thought morally outrageous because it indicated the will of man was trying to manipulate the world of God, his Maker) ceased to be as great an ideological concern during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Magic was merely considered “regressive” and “conservative”: a “bad science” that did not effectively assert the will of man over Nature and therefore interfered with progress. To privilege science over magic could here be seen as a rational, pragmatic choice: science was merely a more (visibly) effective means of asserting the will of Man over Nature, and it became coeval with the (Protestant, but especially Puritan) economic spirit of the age.

The increasing disenchantment with magic and the accompanying precedence of science was evident in the work of early anthropologists, who tended to dismiss magic as an historical throwback. Tyler, for example, plotted the progress of a shift from magic and pseudo science (sorcery, witchcraft, astrology and divination) to lower “natural” and higher “revealed” religions (animism, ancestor worship, fetishism, and Christianity). He believed in social evolution: culture progressed in a moral, scientific and religious sense towards a more perfect state, but certain cultures were held back and remained lower down on the social hierarchy of human progress and mental evolution. Tambiah characterises this belief in the following way:

Today's primitive customs of simpler peoples are the same as, or comparable to, those of antiquity; higher civilizations have preserved primitive features or customs as survivals which are paradoxically testimonies to their progress; the behaviour of our (European) infants and children today illuminate the conduct of adult savages in the non-European world, that is to say, ontogeny (the history of individual development) recapitulates phylogeny (the “racial” evolution of mankind). (44).

This notion of “re-capitulation” asserted that, just as individuals passed from childhood to adulthood, society developed from savagery through to civilisations. This graded differentiation of nature and culture was identified partly in terms of the use of rationality. Tyler argued that the development of “magic” could be explained by a general human propensity for “association of ideas” - that is, the tendency for people to make the logical error of “mistaking ideal connexions for real connexions”, taking “contingent associative relations as causal relations and inverting this relation in a magical act” (Tambiah, 45). For example, if a cock crowed, and the sun rose, it was assumed there was a causal relationship between the two events; a magical practice might then develop whereby images or fetishes of the cock were utilised to ensure the sun rose, perhaps leading to the assumption that the ritual itself caused the sun to rise. In this sense, Tylor considered magic “one of the most pernicious delusions” and believed it contained no truth value. It was an error in logic that needed correcting through the rational explanatory power of science.

Tyler's characteristically Enlightenment notion of “magic” and “occult sciences” as “survivals” from a barbarous past was inherited by Frazer, whose work on primitive rituals and mythology influenced modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. What is significant is that, if science explained the manifestation of the world and man as God's miracle, then religion was pervasive as it was in Greek culture. However, if science, superseding magic, was invoked to explain specific causalities in everyday life, then religion receded further into the background in the practices of secular life. While Tylor and Frazer analysed the psychological and sociological function of magic, they did not recognise or desire it in the present. Fortunately, contemporary anthropologists and cultural theorists have a better understanding of the reasons why magic is not merely an outmoded or primitive mode of thought, but has significant psychological, political and social functions, and is indexical of a moral, symbolic and creative mode of thought that exists even in contemporary secular societies.

Basic Principles of Magic

There are many traditions of magic, ranging from the “primitive” beliefs of a diverse range of nomadic cultures, various sophisticated Eastern forms, and a Western tradition. All of these traditions are opposed to stage magic because they form a way of interpreting the world, a belief system which influences the way its practitioners act, at least or during or within certain “magical” times and/or spaces. However, theorists like Francis King treat the Western magical tradition as “the” serious tradition, both ignoring other forms as being significant ideological forms, and effacing them as real alternative traditions (effectively collapsing them with “stage” magic and superstition). However, the “progression” of Western magical tradition has not been linear, or singular: parallel, convergent and divergent manifestations have developed out of prehistory through to today, and this “tradition” is only identified as a single tradition by virtue of historical continuity and the transmission of some basic assumptions about the nature of “magic”. Indeed, the spatial and temporal distance between the various manifestations of the Western magical traditions has contributed to its syncretic nature. Historians of magic, like Richard Cavendish, are largely concerned with how magical beliefs and practices have developed, borrowed from or revived one another. This involves untangling available historical documents to determine how magic has been disseminated through history and what are some of the common assumptions that surround it. From a historians perspective, it would be difficult or impossible to justify giving the term “magic” its own history rather than subsuming it to the history of religion or science without addressing such a concern.

It is also difficult to distinguish between the (past) beliefs of actual magicians and the categories of anthropologists because modern magicians, such as Isaac Bonewits (who has his own website on Neo-Paganism), characterise magic using some of the categories of anthropologists, and some of the more “serious” magicians throughout history were less vocal about their magical practices than modern magicians. However, popular assumptions about magic in contemporary societies are often reconstructions of diverse beliefs. Many of the so-called Laws of magic are not essential to any belief in magic in a general sense, though they reveal much about magical practices and psychology. However, it is possible to briefly identify some of the general ideas, which may be seen as marking a conceptual or ideological predisposition for belief in magic, including Neo-Pagan Witchcraft (Wicca) and other (stereo-)typical forms and representations.

Generally, magic may be defined in terms of ritual actions whose intended effects are thought to be immediately effective upon the world, whether through their appeal to innate forces or objects of power in Nature, or by appealing to spirits or gods. The most common magical forms, which Frazer notably analysed, involve “sympathetic” or “imitative” magic. For example, in tribal cultures, rituals involving jumping are believed to cause crops to grow taller. However, the system of imitation was often more complex than this, since it was governed by symbolic correspondences: one invoked the cosmic force of say Mercury or Venus to gain the characteristics of those planets, imitating not the thing itself, but something that represented the attributes one wished to reassign. “Contagious” magic, on the other hand, is where something taken from someone or something retains its link to that object (for example, fingernails or hair is thought to retain a link to the person they were taken from).

Though both “imitative” and “contagious” magic are categories of Frazer's, they are, as Tambiah argues, conceptual categories that have productive meanings in other fields, such as in semiotics, under the names “metaphor” and “metonymy”. What remains of particular interest is the systems of correspondence between symbols, parts/positions of entrails, points of the body, images/colours on cards, and/or stellar bodies, which provide the force or means for interpretation of magical events. There are many different systems of correspondence, but magical traditions try to correlate them - for example, the sephiroth of the Jewish cabala are often aligned with the planets. Correspondences persist today through the practices of various forms of divination: the casting of lots (sortilege), interpreting omens or portents (augury), interpreting the positions of astronomical bodies (astrology), and the interpretation of utterances by people in ecstatic states or trances (mediums, priests, oracles, possessed people). They also persist in some anthropological and psychological texts under the guise of Jungian “archetypes”. James Joyce also provides an elaborated system of correspondences, his Gilbert and Linati schemes, which explain the structure of Ulysses.

These correspondences usually are built upon a mimetic view of the world, that is, an assumed correspondence between words and the reality they purport to describe. An early example of this can be found in Tetragrammaton, which assumes the correspondence between the name of God and the universe, and therefore sees the "true" name of God as providing one with power. It is significant that magic and the occult - its Latin root is occulere , which means “to hide” - are generally synonymous, for in magic there is a belief that a real invisible world is “out there”, hidden, and if we know the words (or correspondences) that describe or identify it, it can be manipulated. To an extent, mimeticism overlaps with the concept of contagious magic, but mimeticism is a central concept because of the emphasis on the relationship between words and knowledge in magic. Words are considered to have power, and to possess someone's true name gives one power over that person.

Magic also depends upon belief in the power of the mind over matter and body. If one has no faith or belief in one's knowledge, one's mind does not have enough power, enough will, to project itself: belief leads to success just as knowledge leads to control, while doubt leads to failure just as ignorance leads to loss of control. This emphasis on “belief” is loosely related to the magical assumption that if one does not conform faithfully to the precepts of a magical tradition, one is not likely to be guaranteed success. An established belief system, considered efficacious for thousands of years, is easier to believe in than a new one whose efficacy is more in question, so some magicians faithfully reiterate word for word phrases thought to be centuries old. This is why many Wiccans have argued that their tradition harks back to original European Pagan traditions, despite the fact that many of its traditions are reconstructions that only date back a couple of centuries. This dogmatic and pragmatic side to magic, which is often considered contrary to change, progress and diversity, is, often (especially in contemporary culture), complemented by a tendency to be highly syncretic and/or inventive in the formation of (new) magical systems (evident in the friendly phrase “what works for you”, which perhaps unwittingly recapitules the more ominous phrase of the infamous Alastair Crowley: "do what though wilt so mete it be").

Early Literary Influences of Magic

Contemporary representations of magic in popular media have a distinctive literary history. Barbara Howard Traister, in Heavenly Necromancers , argues that stage dramatists were not directly influenced by the historical and literary material, and so early representations of magic did not necessarily partake of a belief in magic. However, the “conflux of magical traditions” helps explain how the magician “focuses issues of human potential and limitation and raises the question of how much man was permitted to know” (2).

In medieval romances, such as Parzival, Gawain and the Green Knight, “The Franklin's Tale,” Floris and Blancheflour, Yvain, Sir Orfeo and Sir Launfal, the magician's Merlin, Clinschor, Morgan le Fay and Cundrie are isolated by peculiarities, for example half-human parentage, incredibly ugliness, and lack of filial bonds. They seem to have an skill at magic, and are self-sufficient in their trade, without the bookishness of the Renaissance scholar-mages or later representations of wizards. Indeed, while they may produce magical objects usually these objects have no source, or explanation. Indeed, the whole “faerie” or “magical” world may exist without any explanation for its origin, as in Sir Orfeo and Sir Launfal, though as Tolkein's later versions of the “faerie” indicate with their excessive mythical exposition these origins are usually assumed to have some mystical or religious source and represent some older order. The role of the magician in these texts was, then, not to explain the source of magic, but to be mere agents of it. Indeed, “the medieval romances show little or no interest in theories of magic” (26), and they primarily have literary uses, to “facilitate plot and provide spectacular effects” (23), with “magical prophecy to provide suspense or foreshadowing, humor and practical jokes arising from magical powers, and plot interest heightened by miraculous occurrences” (26). Their role was usually morally ambiguous, in that while it was recognised that there were bad forms of magic, magic was not dramatised as being inherently evil within the narrative world.

In the romance epics of Boiardo, Tasso, Ariosto, Tasso and so on, the magician is more learned, more dependant upon books and magical hieroglyphics, suggesting that “philosophic magic was influencing Renaissance writers' conception of the magician” (27). The magician in these texts was also usually associated with spirits or demons, and while sometimes these texts dramatised the distinction between natural and ceremonial magic, magicians in them tended to utilise demons in their magical practices whether they were servants of God or the devil. Through the tragedy, didactic drama and romantic comedy of Minor Tudor and Stuart Stage Dramas, there were other magicians like Brain Sans Foy and Subtill Shift, Bomelio, Sacrapant, John a Kent and John a Cumber, Vandermast, Peter Fabell (the Merry Devil of Edmonton), Pope Alexander, and types such as the Magician and Enchanter. These magicians were more human and fallible; indeed at times their fallibility when it came to realising their good or evil goals were a stock formula in many plays. There were, of course, more ambiguous figures, and a few stage magicians, such as Friar Bacon, Doctor Faustus, Bussy D'Ambois, Prospero, were not merely used as literary motif but were a self-conscious way of organising the structure of the play itself. These more sophistocated explorations of the figure of the magician enabled subsequent writers to identify and employ fairly standard tropes. Traister argues that after a disappearance from stage he reappeared “only in a few court masques or as a parody of himself, a pseudo-magus” (1).

It is here important to point out that many contemporary theorists tend to lump various forms of magic, and other fantastic literary elements, under the heading of “supernatural fiction”, as does Clery in “The Rise of Supernatural Fiction”. However, magic is only supernatural for those who do not believe in it. For magicians, magic appeals to natural laws, and a whole body of moral or ethical laws are coded in this nature. Certainly, as Clery argues, magic was dismissed by Enlightenment rationality and reduced to mere literary tropes, but Clery speaks of a problematic at the end of the eighteenth century, and while this may be true to a large extent today it is easy to efface the way many readers of magic perceive it not merely as a literary trope but as an efficacious, if mysterious, reality, and/or valid orientation towards the world.

Texts on the History, Anthropology and Psychology of Magic

Cavendish, Richard. A History of Magic . London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1977.

This text traces, from a historical persective, manifestations of “magic” and its associated concepts through Rome and the East, Christianity and the Middle Ages, The Renaissance and the so-called Modern Revival. This history begins with the etymology of the term magic, and its association with Zoroaster and the Persian “Magi,” through to the witch mania and magicians after Aleister Crowley, and while it covers much of the same material as Tambiah and King, it does so in more detail, forming a continuous narrative that gives the term “magic” the kind of independance it does not have in many other studies which force it to defer to “science” and “religion”, though Cavendish does argue how the three are related. I choose this text not merely because of its lucidity in placing in perspective notions like “black,” “white,” “high” and “low” magic, but because many of the concepts surrounding magic, as Cavendish outlines them, find surprising parallels in contemporary theory, most curiously, the notion of magic as “mimicry” prefigures notions of simulation that we find in Baudrillard.

King, Francis. Magic : The Western Tradition . New York : Thames and Hudson Inc., 1975.

King's essay may be seen as a shorthand version of the history of magic Richard Cavendish offers, though King only deals with a particular esoteric tradition of magic, one which is derived not from “legend or folklore, but . . . the Hermetica and the Gnostic literature of the Roman Empire”. He briefly traces the eclipse of “classical” magic by Christianity and the superstition of the Gromoires of the Middle Ages, then considers prominant Renaissance magicians, or scholars, and figures through the Romantic Revival (the seventeenth century), the War of the Roses (between two camps of the Rosi+Cross, or Rosicrucians, as they are better known). This leads to a discussion of later “synthesizers” of magical practices, and more contemporary figures, primarily Aleister Crowley. Like many contemporary theorists, his general argument is that older forms of magic, indeed many cosmologies which have influences amongst Greek myths, were sophistocated forms for describing the complexity of the human psyche. Unfortunately, King does not discuss the significances of what are two very different modalities, that is, the ritual ceremonies characteristic of the past, and the sciences of psychology and psychiatry which are used now. He concludes that the syncretism of magic in its present formations, its “willingness too accept growth and new ideas”, indicates that “the Western magical revival” will continue.

Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Magic, science, religion and the scope of rationality . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Tambiah traces the intellectual history of Western thought which frames anthropological, sociological and philosophical writings that categorise magic, science and religion. He begins by discussing notions of magic through Judaic religion, early Greek science, Renaissance philosophy, the Protestant Reformation and the European scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He then provides chapters on Tylor and Frazer, Malinowski and Levi Bruhl, focusing on these theorists distinctions between “mystical” and “logical” mentalities; that is, on the differences between “primitive” or “savage” minds and the “civilised” or “modern” minds. The material on Tyler and Frazer is of particular interest, where he critiques the early anthropologists' appraisals of “primitive cultures” and their role in the evolution of Mankind/Humanity. Another important aspects is how Christian religion persisted innocently alongside science despite scientific classifications of magic as prelogical, a classification that, logically, would seem to have applied to religion. Tambiah then moves to a discussion of rationality, relativism, and the translation and commensurability of cultures, offerring an overview of how recent theories in science effect discussions of magic, science and religion, with a focus on Max Weber's theories. His conclusions stress the need for a patient “charity” in the translation of different cultures, a need to foreground the humanity and rational consistency inherent in other (often non-scientific) systems of meaning. From a cultural studies perspective his discussions of representation are, perhaps, held back by references to earlier, more philosophical theories (for example Wittgenstein's), however the text as a whole clarifies many distinctions embedded in early anthropological and sociological theories of “primitives” and “natives”.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning . New York: Schocken Books, 1979.

In this short text, Claude Levi-Strauss discusses some of the major issues that have influenced his work, for example the distinction between myth, science and history; the relationship between ‘primitive' thinking and the ‘civilised' mind; and the relationship between myth and music. Wendy Doniger's introduction foregrounds the way Levi-Strauss has often been misrepresented as too abstract, ahistorical and clinical because of his structuralist argument that myths can be reduced into mathematical equations or systems or relationships. Doniger argues that he is in fact deeply concerned with historical contexts and the diversity of meanings humans produce out of them. This text is useful for my argument in that it addresses the key opposition between religion, science and magic that are diffused through popular culture, without getting bound up in the complexity of the debates as they occur in Levi-Strauss' original books.

Alcock, James E. Parapsychology: Science or Magic? : A Psychological Perspective. Oxford : Pergamon Press, 1981.

This text provides a skeptical approach to parapsychology, considering what prevents it from gaining acceptance to the scientific community and why, if it does not exist, there is persistent belief in it. Foregrounding the “super-natural/ transcendental/ paranormal” beliefs in all societies, he considers the processes by which such beliefs might be generated. In the “Psychology of Belief” he argues that beliefs cannot be isolated, like scientific “facts”, but exist hierarchically in human psychology; in “The Psychology of Experience” he argues that, because of the nature of perception, we should except to occasionally experience what is considered “paranormal”; and in “The Fallibility of Human Judgement” he considers the ways in which humans infer causal relations when they may not be present. This last section, drawing on Piaget, is an interesting complement to the tripartite scheme of Freud's which Jackson uses regarding Animism, Religion and Science. In the last three chapters he considers the issue of “scientific evidence and statistical evidence for parapsychology” and discusses the continuing debate between advocates and critics of parapsychology, and how this debate is effected by “the media and popular literature” (vii). As an indication of his skeptical approach and the relevant texts in the field, I point out that Alcock's extensive bibliography includes Cavendish, Eliade, Evans-Pritchard, Frazer, Freud, Huxley, Jung, Koestler, Kuhn, Langer, Levy-Bruhl, Piaget and Popper, as well as a range of other social psychologists, psychiatrists and cultural theorists, focusing on perception, causality and chance as well as the magic, religion and science.

Signatures of Magic

While much recent writing about “magic” in Cultural Studies—for example on the “fantastic” or on discursive analyses of European history—has been oriented towards Foucauldian analyses, it is also productive to emphasise the concept of ideology. This is not to undermine discourse theory and its relevance to any discussion of magic (in fact I would argue that their combination is productive), I merely wish to clarify the relationship between “ideology” and “discourse” and consider what they each have to offer in a theorisation of “magic”.

When used in texts like Gerhild Scholz Williams' Defining Dominion: The Discourses of Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern France and Germany , Foucault's notion of discourse is useful in the way it emphasises the way magic has been marginalised and how the term “magic” has been a site for the negotiation of power. “Magic” is usually bound up in individuals - either disempowered by institutions, or unable to accept the limited resources of themselves as human beings in a world of overwhelming natural forces - trying to assert power, and also - usually as a consequence, in discourses illegitimating that power. Williams identifies three relevant discourses - the discourse of magic as it related to women and witchcraft, the discourses of discovery, and the discourses of religious diversity and dissidence (Williams, 3), as influencing how various institutions made sense of and reacted to it. A range of other historical or Foucauldian analyses focus on witches, such as Barstow's Witch Craze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts , Levack's The Witch-Hunt in Early Medieval Europe , and Willis' Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England , but overlap with analyses of outcasts, dissidents and other marginalised groups, as in The German Underworld . These Foucauldian or, more broadly, historical accounts on discursive discontinuity is also useful because it indicates problems of translating between discourses. Certain knowledges may be incommensurable, and it may be inappropriate to judge other ways of knowing, because we impose our own categories on non-modern and/or pre-modern cultures (the two are often collapsed), leading to a misreading of the magical beliefs of earlier or non-modern cultures.

While Foucault made room for active subjectification and resistance in his model, it has been argued that, by considering ideology as a monolithic force that imposes itself on individuals, Althusser's formulation of ideology “denies political agency to social subjects” (Buchbinder, 7), and does not adequately represent the actual processes of historical change. So while Althusser stresses the fact that the subject is always-already interpellated, Foucault argues that power is always-already contested . This emphasis on discourse as a process has been taken up by cultural theorists with the argument that not only is meaning always being contested, in constant dialogue between individuals constituting their identities in a socio-historical context, but power is in constant negotiation. If power is immanent in social relationships, and power is in constant negotiation, then Foucault's theory includes the process of social change in his theory. This emphasis on meaning and power as being negotiated by subjects emphasises their symbolic responses within the limits of the discourses in/by which they are constituted. Consequently, the symbolic creativity of individuals is seen as central to the way meaning and power is produced and dispersed (or dispensed) through culture.

One reason for reconsidering older notions of ideology in accounting for magic is that “magic” - or at least the trickery of the stage conjuror or illusionist - has often been, and still is, used as an analogy for how ideology operates. Althusser, following Marx's theory and history of capitalism and its effects, defined ideology as the imaginary relations of individuals to the real relations in which they live. In thise sense, an invocation of magic draws on certain assumptions about ideology as “false consciousness” that masks “real relations”; that is, the above metaphor would seem to imply that what the magician “hides” with his “trickery” and “sleight of hand” is “reality”: an empirically verifiable series of causes and effects (regarding production) was masked. Of course, Althusser refuted the notion of ideology as “false consciousness”; for him, the shift in capitalism from use value (“which has its origins in Locke's theory of property” and has a moral function in Marx's theory) to exchange value was accompanied by false value, exploitation and deception, estranging humanity from itself (82). So ideology has

an intimate relation to the way economic systems in general in capitalism in particular work to conceal their essential operations while presenting to those who inhabit them an illusory appearance of things. Ideology in Althusser's account is simply the way this process of self-occultation occurs at the level of collective consciousness or thought, not illusion merely but necessary illusion produced by the operations of the system itself. Thus ideology . . . expresses not the relation between men and their real conditions of existence but the way men live the relation between themselves and their real conditions of existence. So ideology, far from being false consciousness merely, expresses its own kind of truth (83).

Despite this qualification, Foucault is opposed to the concept of ideology because the discourse of Marxism in which ideology is couched constructs ideology as “false consciousness”, a mask that covers, or complex mediation of. “reality”, some “kind of truth”. That is, the very notion of an “imaginary relation”, or “false consciousness” implies a set of “non-imagined” or “real” relations”, a “true consciousness”, even if it is suggested or stated otherwise. Foucault's aim “was to avoid analyses of discourse (or ideology) as reflections, no matter how sophisticatedly mediated, of something supposedly “deeper” and more “real”, but merely to show how discourse operated, that is, how it was instantiated by social practices” (Rabinow, 10). For Foucault, “truth”, “rationality”, indeed all the “great concepts”, are historically constituted and subject to discursive formations, and Marxist discourse does not articulate this relativity: indeed most discourses universalise their conceptions as “true” and “rational”, so to say ideology “expresses its own kind of truth” has little or no explanatory force in a characterisation of ideology.

The analogy of “magic” and “ideology” is also used to critique the idea of ideology, to characterise the theorist and theory (that is, Marx or Althusser and their theories about capitalism and ideology) as opposed to the (“real”) processes the theory/theorists are trying to describe. Dowling - who traces the provenance of Fredric Jameson's thought to articulate the “subtext” of The Political Unconscious - says that Marx “performed a sleight of hand” by offering dialectical materialism as grounded in materialism, for the concept operated as an idealist principle of intelligibility (49) - that is, it offered itself as the absolute explanation of the social. For Marx, the economy plays the same role as the World Spirit for Hegel, “operating as that hidden essence that may be invoked to explain a world of changing appearances otherwise unintelligible in their variety and apparent randomness” (48). Similarly, many other Western philosophers offer only one form of interpretation, and consider other interpretations as illegitimate. Jameson uses Deleuze and Guattari's work to attack this invocation of a “hidden essence” which he calls “transcendent” interpretation, which gives

the ‘meaning' of its object by rewriting some primary reality in terms of a master code or master narrative. Transcendent interpretation is transcendent by virtue, as used to be said in critical theory, of ‘going outside the text' to found its significant on some extratextual set of norms (102).

We should remember here that a capitalised History once referred to “the” official, authorised and unquestioned representation of “what really happened” in the formation of “Western society”. Contemporary theorists argue that any History is merely one version of “what happened” and encodes a whole range of ideological assumptions; for the West, History was constructed in such a way that it encoded assumptions about “individuals”, “progress”, “rationality”, the “state” and so on, legitimating social formations like patriarchy and capitalism. Marxist History referred to the narrative about the economy, which subsumed all other social history; all phenomena could be, indeed had to be, related to the rise and fall of capitalism, and, at least in most re-readings of Marx, the establishment of communism. Given his Marxist provenance, Jameson is sometimes mistaken as believing that there is a specific “real world”. However,

The aim of Jameson's critical practice is to tear away the veil of illusion from the social and cultural and historical process and allow us to glimpse the eternal Necessity beyond, and a Freedom that can be won from that Necessity only when all mystification has ceased to exist. On Jameson's account of the totality we can never in direct terms know what History is, but given the prevalence of ideology and illusion we can always know what it is not. (56)

That is, while Jameson uses Marx's notion of History, Necessity and Freedom, he recuperates the terms by stripping them of their objectivity. They do not constitute a “true” consciousness, merely the general dependence of human structures on the materiality in which they are embedded.

Magic's emphasis on the “unseen” or “unknown” correlates with psychoanalytic notions of the “unconscious”, and certainly ideology and psychoanalysis are often employed simultaneously, with the “transcendent meaning” of the social seen as a “latent” meaning hidden by the “manifest” text. A vulgar Freudian approach tries to see through manifest words to the latent meaning , and implies that desire is the latent meaning, the “hidden essence”. Any interpretation that does not evoke desire to “explain the world of changing appearances” renders the phenomena in question “unintelligible” and “random”. And of course, magic is popularly understood in terms of “wishful thinking”, that is, where desire - structured by or in the psyche - is projected , then it can be seen as a meaningful social act in that it is a compensation for something.

But fantasy is not merely wish-fulfilment, or a symptom of repression; fantasy (and cinema) cannot merely be considered “mass produced daydreams, as vehicles of either a coercive or potentially liberating wish-fulfilment, or fantasy as a genre (including science fiction, horror and swords-and-sorcery)” (Donald, 4). The turn to fantasy stresses the dynamic relationships between the psychic and social, “the difficulty of making direct links between the social and the psychic” (20), because they both influence each other. Indeed, within the “turn to fantasy”, theorists like Rosemary Jackson (who invokes Jameson), argue that “ideology is profoundly unconscious” (31).

What Jackson is trying to say is that the processes of ideology as Marxists theorise it do not occur “consciously” - they are naturalised, and individuals do not usually think at the level of ideology. Jackson actually carelessly conflates psychoanalytic and Marxist terminology, and does not specify what Jameson means by his simultaneous invocation of ideology and psychoanalysis. For Jameson, it might be argued, ideology is not unconscious, rather the contradictions specific to each ideology are unconscious - inasmuch as they are not consciously recognised as contradictions. What ideology hides is not some external “reality” but an aspect contained within discourse and ideology, that is, discursive relationships inherent in ideology itself.

What is conscious within ideology, then, are the “imaginary relationships”, the visible mythology whose characters we identify with. Ideology is, then, both conscious and unconscious. Jameson's phrase “signatures of the visible” recognises this; what is unconscious, or invisible, is the subtext which informs the contradictions, and “what is visible, there for interpretation, is the way the ideological structure registers the strain of having kept it [History as an ‘absent cause'] repressed” (Dowling, 117). Visibility and consciousness are not the same thing: the tensions are visible, but analysis is necessary to bring them to consciousness as “signatures” of the “political unconscious” - we must place them in their “overdetermined” (in Althusser's sense) historical context to expose the subtext in which the contradiction itself actually occurs. While a signature may be visible , it is not always easy to interpret, and we may not be conscious of the name it spells.

In this formulation, the cultural artefact, or text, is a “symbolic resolution of a real contradiction, an attempt to resolve on an imaginary level the intolerability of a lived dilemma” (119). That is, texts are both symbolic acts and symbolic acts : genuine acts in that they try to do something to the world, yet “symbolic” in the sense that the world is untouched, invoking the problematic dynamic between “text and reality, literature and the world, the symbolic and the Real” ( ). It is useful here to paraphrase Dowling's commentary at length:

As Jameson's invocation of Levi-Strauss and his repeated description of nineteenth-century fiction as the pensee sauvage of the bourgeoisie demonstrate, it is examples from magic and ritual that make things clearest here. Suppose, for instance, that we were to see an old peasant woman leave on her doorstep every night a dish of milk, and suppose we know too that she believes no natural creatures (cats, children, etc.) to be abroad after nightfall, so that the act is clearly one of propitiation toward supernatural beings who have the power to do humans harm. The important point is not simply that the act in itself projects the realm of supernatural or magical creatures as really existing (would be meaningless as an act without that), but also that the act aims to modify their existence and behavior in a certain way: that is, to appease them so that they will not do the mischief they would otherwise do. Thus we have, in Jameson's terms, not only the projection of a subtext but also its denial or negation : the “meaning” of the old woman's act is the harm or evil that, so long as the magic is successful, never gets expressed.

Magic and ritual provide useful examples, in turn, because they have the virtue of suggesting the sense in which all symbolic acts are “magical,” what Burke points to in observing that a symbolic act wants to have an impact on the world while leaving the world untouched.

Since the act of laying out milk does not really effect the world, the act is symbolic ; yet it is also intelligible as an act because it intends to have an impact on the world. (While “fantasy” or “wishful thinking” is intelligible as an act in terms of it being a compensation, it only gains intelligibility as an act in Dowling's sense when understood not merely a compensation for something, but an act which will result in the attainment of what one is “wishful” for, that is, when its “wish-fulness” becomes “will-fulness”.) In this sense, “the Real [the Necessity in which all humans are embedded] is inscribed in symbolic acts in . . . the sense in which it represents, and may be grasped by interpretation as, the imaginary solution of a real contradiction” ( ).

It is useful to use phrase “signatures of magic” then to emphasise the textual component of magical practice or representations - its emphasis on occult symbols, vague phrasing, verbose incantations, and so on; and, by invoking Jameson, one simultaneously indicates magic as a ritual act, as the performance or reading of such texts. A consideration of “signatures of magic” is, then, to address the way that certain ideological and discursive tensions are resolved through representations of “magic”.

Dowling, William C. Jameson, Althusser, Marx. An Introduction to the “Political Unconscious”. Great Britain: Methuen, 1984.

Dowling attempts to fill in the background of Jameson's The Political Unconscious by discussing Jameson's key assumptions, and their provenance, through Marx and Althusser. I use the text as a means to draw together some clarifications (and critiques) of Jameson's theory still valid (indeed even more pertinant given Jameson's increasing sophistocation) today. For Dowling, Jameson's difficult writing is a necessary corrollary of the fact that Jameson's writing shows as well as tells : to state what one means and be able to “grasp the point” is inconsistent with Jameson description of social processes and theoretical conclusions that are elusive and defy categorisation; his language attempts to be unsettling, being part of a revolutionary dialectic; Marxism has been typified by its failures, Stalinism, and Marxist writers have to locate themselves carefully in a tradition; because he attempts to envelope a host of other theorists under his own project; and because Jameson's argument is part of a dialogue with theorists like Althusser, and for the sake of practicality one cannot perform a dialogue if one is continually explicating the assumptons of that dialogue: it assumes the reader has some familiarity with the grounds of the dialogue; finally, Jameson's writing is complex because he synthesises many ideas, a kind of “originality-in-synthesis”.

In his first section, Dowling gives two examples of Jameson's “Dialectical Thinking.” First, Jameson's remarks about the history of painting, which is related to notions of “an unfallen social reality [in which] there is no painting” (21), that is, of “primitive communism,” a moment before the estrangement and alienation of capitalism, which involves an internal split consequent upon reification in which humans are products of objective capitalism, for example the separation of the rational from the emotional, the empirical or discriptive from the perception of meaning or value (an argument similar to Levi-Strauss'). Second, Jameson's “historicising” of Freud, showing that Freud's theories of the psyche do not reveal a “permanent human nature” but are ultimately grounded in History and Necessity. (History and Necessity are not, as Dowling goes on to argue late, the grand narrative of history, but the general notion of the dependance of humans and human institutions on their materiality; indeed we might say that Jameson recuperates the term History in its sense as a monological narrative as a negative term, an abstraction which speaks of the limits of human meaning and human history - though we should foreground that either this History exists as the ghost of the old dominant narrative, as co-existent with or interchangeable with the notion of Necessity, or as separate or multiple and combined discourses, each with its own history, a point we see in criticisms of Baudrillard's Code). For Jameson, “Freudian theory, despite what Freud may have believed, has as its true object nbot sexual desire but Desire ityself, the primal energy that gives form not only individual lives but to human society in all its manifestations” (32). I would note:

Freud's central importance for Jameson derives from his insight that interpretation is indispensible in any situation where a latent meaning lies hidden behind what is open or expressed or manifest, and that this in turn is always the case when a primal and eternally repressed source of energy (for Freud the individual consciousness, for Jameson the collective or “political” consciousness) exists in a troubled and antagonistic relation to that overt structures (For Freud the mechanism of the conscious, for Jameson culture and ideology viewed as a whole) that exist to hold the repressed at bay or “manage” its threatening eruptions (36-7).

Dowling's second section, “Thinking the Totality,” argues that “totality is humanity is history,” in short that nothing beyong human history can be conceived, and that the limits of history are the limits of thought (a notion analogous to the fact that we think through discourse, and that it conditions what we can and cannot think, and enables us to consider something not as an idea but as an a priori fact, like Kant's time and space). Dowling relates this to “the experience of one's own identity as consisting of a separation fro everything external to one's consciousness: I am ‘in here' in my mind, so to speak, and everything that is the external world or universe is precisely wjhat is outside, the entire realm of whatever is or could be ‘not-me.'” (40) We do not relate this experience as being constructed,

as rising to the abstract level of the conceptual or phiolosophical [when it] is fact buttressed by the metaphysics of that entire tradition called philosophical empiricism, the tradition that runs from Descartes' cogito and Locke's tabula rasa to Bertrand Russell's modern attempts to found knowledge in “knowledge by acquaintance” and knowledge by acquaintance in a reality innocently perceived by the senses (41).

This is a notion critiqued by structuralism and poststructuralism with the “decentring of the subject” but which Dowling pursues through Durkheim, Hegel and Marx tracing the notion of “the social totality as an ultimate category” (43) and notions of “the mind itself as a sphere of consciousness alienated from the reality outside it” (43). For Hegel, reality unfolds “through its contradictions and ris[es] to ever-higher levels until Spirit” achieves the kind of totality as Durkheim's social totality, and compelling us “to view human cultures and their history as part of a total process” (45). Marx replaced the World Spirit with the economy (that is, the material foundation of humanity in history, and the persistent exploitation of humanity by fellow humans) which determines the systems of social relations at each period in history, that is, the successive modes of production, which have a “powerful role in determining the shape of the social totality” (47). However for Marx, the economy plays the same role as the World Spirit for Hegel, “operating as that hidden essence that may be invoked to explain a world of changing appearences otherwise unintelligeble in their cariety and apparent randomness” (48).

In short, Marx may be viewed as perpetrating an unwitting sleight of hand here, claiming the economic as material because the forces and relations of economic production belong to the material world - the ripening of crops and refining of metals do not take place, after all, in any immaterial world of Spirit - while within his explanatory system the economic has the force of an idealist principle of intelligibility (49).

There can thus be seen to be a justification for Stalinism in Marxism, then, whereupon Jameson is forced to re-work the notion of social totality so as to circumvent this “theological” criticism, positing totality “not as some concrete and posive vision of history but as an ideal and abstract standard that allows him to expose all partial or limited ideological truths as such” (51), in short as a “methodological standard”, a negative dialectic because it has no real content. (Dowling's argument that representations of God diminish the reality of His infinity is related to notions of the sublime, and Dowling gives the example of

“Blake's Nobodaddy, a petty celestial tyrant with a white beard who gives back the image of those petty minds who worhship him; yet the human mind does eternally create its Nobodaddies, and only by destroying them as they arise may a truer spirit tear away the veil of illusion and glimpse the light of an infinity beyond (51-2).) Marxism thus tries to “unmask such aspects of human culture as law, art, or religion as forms of falsae consciousness, for instance, as the passive and illusory rteflections of a real system of economic relations hidden beneath the surface, is implicitly to suggest that one possesses a true or genuine explanation of the wholee, a vision of the totality that can then function as a yardstick against which the partial visions of ideology can be measured” (52). However the inability to get beyond systems (see Pynchon and Paul Davies) undermines this notion. Dowling focuses on an account of Christianity in Marxism. Art constructs formal, and false unity at the aesthetic level “to shut our or deny the intolerable reality of History” (54). Jameson uses Marx's notion of

Necessity itself, that dark and implacable force lying eternally just beyond the borders of any possible vision of human freedom, that baleful power that through all the ages of humanity has been at work to produce relations of domination within soeicty, has led to alienation and fragmentation and estrangement, to our permanent imprisonment withon one or another structure of false reality. The endless dismantling of such false structures, a repeated and hopeful gesture in the direction of that Freedom that may ultimately be won from Necessity, will be the distinguishing mark of Jameson's criticism (55).

And again,

The aim of Jameson's critical practice is to tear awa the veil of illusion from the social and cultural and historical process and allow us to glimpse the eternal Necessity beyond, and a Freedom that can be won fromn that Necessity only when all mystification has ceased to exist. On Jameson's account of the totality we can never in direct terms know what History is, but given the prevalence of ideology and illusion we can always know what it is not (56).

Unfortunately, Dowling is doing Jameson a disservice here by constructing a new contradiction. First, Necessity as a pan-theory has no explanatory force when it comes to more sophistocated questions of ideology (the same as saying Desire, or Suffering, or Salvation is an explanation), it is merely an underlying assumption upon which to base other theories. Second, a state of Freedom does not exist except in the imagination: we might argue that Jameson is trying to come to terms with, not defeat Necessity in as much as we accept ideology as a Necessary form because we have to live in the world and to say it is false is to deny this.

“The Problem of the Superstructure” deals with the ways in which Jameson legitimates studying literature from a Marxist context which traditionally views literature as merely homologous with other systems of false consciousness (religion, politics etc). Indeed

A Marxist cricticism taking the model [of base-superstructure] seriously . . . not only must view the entire superstructure asthe unreal fabric of appearances projected by underlying economic reality, but within that context must view art and literature as being more unreal than everything else, epiphenomena of the already epiphenomenal (60).

The problem comes in the relation between the base and superstructure as being causal: a problem because, as Kant demonstrates, in mechanical causality substance can have no causal effect on non-substance; also, in expressive causality (“an essence expressed by and equally present in every element or feature of a visible system of appearances” (64) whereby a face is an expression of happiness, of which the face partakes of that happiness), we have the delusion of organic historical periods or epochs, which we assume are expressions of some hidden essence, a Zeitgeist, for things are not expressed , but mediated . Althusser consequently introduces a notion of “structural causality” for “he wishes to arrive at an epxlanation of the structure of social reality which does not appeal to any notion of occult causality to obtain its results” (66). In structural causality, it is not “an essence hidden behind or beneath the surface of things” that explains social reality, but the relations among elements (of the superstructure), in the understanding that the structure is always more than the sum of its parts, and the something “more” is the structure itself, hence a notion of overdetermination. Three important concepts here are that history is an absence cause, that structures (such as religion, politics) have a relative autonomy, and the superstructure is itself mediated by and mediates the base (but Althusser critiques the traditional Marxist notion that mediation implies homology, whereby disparate structures “are really identical with one another and with the economic level underneath” (71). Jameson disagress with Althusser because the latters criticism of expressive causality and homology ignores the fact that talking of difference at cultural or idealogical levels presumes a prior unity, and ultimate identity presumes prior difference. (Tambiah deals with this in terms of common ground between different cultures, and the problems of translation and incommensurability.)

“Strategies of Containment” are, as Dowling summarises, “a way of achieving coherence by shutting out the truth about History” (77), that is it involves a discssion of ideology and its “repression of those underlying contradictions that have their source in History and Necessity” (77). Jameson's criticism thus intends to show the specific ways History is repressed, and what it might look like without elements of it being repressed.

[A]ccording to Althusser, no social system could reproduce itself without ideology, and what is always true about ideology is the way it expresses the collective mind within the limits imposed by historical situation. Ideology is not just mystification (that is, something that obscures the real relations of things in the world) but essential mystification: one could not imagine a human society without it (83).

Dowling foregrounds Jameson's treatment of other theorists in the assumption that anything other than genuine Marxist criticism is ideological (Dowling is mistaken here, for Marxism is likewise ideological; however it, along with other forms of cultural theory, force us to think at the level of ideology); Jameson thus considers how other theorists and literary works repress or deny History by exposing contradictions, the unspoken assumptions (and I would note that this desire to expose contradictions is similar to science's attempts to give a coherent rational explanation to any event that defies logic, for example supernatural events or magic acts). Dowling then summarises Jameson's critique of A. J. Greimas, who, as a structuralist operates to deny history beneath an ontological structuralism, that is, “someone who views the abstract terms and combinatory possibilities as mapping out the actual logical structure of reality, and therefore as having the same sort of timeless validity as logic or mathermatics (86). Jameson's re-reading of structuralism is that the categories used by theorists to describe the social often invoke the same categories as those available to artists and so on; that is, of showing that Freudian analysis has a validity in dealing with categories local to a historical context. For example, through Freud's theories and the culture out of which his ideas develop is a presumption of the assumption of “individual person” or “individual psyche”, an assumption Lacan critiques by showing how the subject only achieves a coherent individual by taking up a role in a Symbolic order, and evident in Althusser's notion of ideology.

[I]t is individual identity that formalist citicism honors in structural terms in the name of such concepts as “narrator,” “character,” “point of view,” and the like, and even archetypal and structuralist criticism, with their far greater emphasis on the abstract operations of various systems, retain the category for purposes of analysis (in terms of actants and so on); some Marxist criticisms also retain the category “by regarding social classes like the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as ‘collective characters' within that ‘story' or salvational account of history told by Marx (93).

So “The notion of conceptual categories or aesthetic conventions or social forms as strategies of containment is not meant to liberate us from History, but to liberate us by insisting that we are always and inevitably inside it” (93).

“Narrative and Interpretation” deals with the fact that all forms of meaning are narrativised and require interpretation, and that this can be rendered in Freudian terms of a manifest meaning and latent content, and that history likewise requires interpretation. Jameson uses Deleuze and Guattari to show how with Freud one form of interpretation is used as a legitimation to deny other meanings, other interpretations, impovering texts, so Deleuze and Guattari attack not interpretation as such but “transcendant” interpretation, which gives

the ‘meaning' of its object by rewriting some primary reality in terms of a master code or master narrative. Transcendent interpretation is transcendent by virtue, as used to be said in critical thoery, of ‘going outside the text' to found its significant on some extratextual set of norms (102).

On the other hand, New Criticism aims we should not go beyond the text - we must treat the text as logically consistent and let our criticism work with the immanent meanings in the text, with the logic that “if as monotheists we object that polytheism is an illusion or falsehood . . . if as atheists or agnostics we cannot believe in any godhead at all” (105) we will find many texts inaccessible, though New Criticism founds itself in the notion of an “integrated identity, a whole self, a stable and balanced individual psyche” (106), “an ideological reverse if the estranged and alienated and fragmented reality that is modern life under capitalism” and so functions ideologically by perpetuating oppressive social relations. For Jameson, we do not abolish interpretation, we recognise it as necessary error to arrive at our conclusions (Dowling draws an analogy to neo-Platonic notions of rising through imperfect imitations to reach ideality). Jameson argues this in relation to medieval exegesis, the interpretation of which rises from the literal (Israel's history), the allegorical (Christ as “interpretative code”), the moral (the individual, “psychogical” level) and the anagogical (Mankind, the “collective” level); Northrup Frye inverts the last two, resolving interpretation in individual psychology and thus becoming “an unwitting promulgator of that ‘ideology of desire' of which one heard so much during the countercultural years of the 1960's, an ideology of merely personal or individual ecstasy in place of that collective transformation of social reality which is the apocalypse of Marxist thought” (112). (I would relate this to notions of magic as individual versus collective, and of the difference between biological and cultural influences: eg a biological flight or fight response to the imposed, exploitation by a social system.)

The anagogic is for Frye the level at which the imagination outstrops the forms of its desire (the gardens and cities and sheepfolds of the third level) and comes to perceive the entire universe as something contained within the mind of man . . . a vision of the universe as the throbbing libidinal body of som apocalyptic Blakean man, a recontainment of the collective energies of mankind within the limits of some merely personal ecstasy. Frye's expansion of the individual mind to the point it imaginatively contains the universe thus fails to burst throuh the ideological limitations of the category of individuality itself (112)

“The Political Unconscious” argues that while Jameson uses Freud's notion of the individual conscious, it is in the context of structuralist theory whereby the individual depends on the collective. Nonetheless Dowling could have clarified that the political unconscious does not involve a “collective unconsciousness” per se, but a variety of individual unconscioussness, each constructed by, or in relation to, an ideological framework which, for the individual to internalise, necessitates some form of repression. These contradictions can be a source for revolutionary impulses, and Jameson invokes Althusser's notion of History as an ‘absent cause' because there is a “not-revolution” at each moment in history. “[W]hat is visible, there for interpretation, is the way the ideological structure registers the strain of having kept it repressed” (117). Analysing ideology involves here trying to divine the absent cause. Dowling here considers Jameson's treatment of Levi-Strauss, the interest “in the cultural artifact as the symbolic resolution of a real contradiction, an attempt to resolve on an imaginary level the intolerability of a lived dilemma” (119), though for Jameson the contradictions occur at the level of an underlying subtext, at an invisible level. An important point here is that texts are both symbolic acts and symbolic acts : genuine acts in that they try to do something to the world, yet “symbolic” in the sense that the world is untouched, invoking the problematic dynamic between “text and reality, literature and the world, the symbolic and the Real” (a problem dealt with by the notion of overdetermination and relative autonomy). The issue of “magic and ritual” is of particular significance to me here, for it relates quite neatly to a whole range of issues that Tambiah deals with in his text, so I quote Dowling at length.

As Jameson's invocation of Levi-Strauss and his repeated description of nineteenth-century fiction as the pensee sauvage of the bourgeoisie demonstrate, it is examples from magic and ritual that make things clearest here. Suppose, for instance, that we were to see an old peasant woman leave on her doorstep every night a dish of milk, and suppose we now too that she believes no natural creatures (cats, children, etc.) to be abroad after nightfall, so that the act is clearly one of propitiation toward supernatural beings who have the power to do humans harm. The important point is not simply that the act in itself projects the realm of supernatural or magical creatures as really existing (would be meaningless as an act without that), but also that the act aims to modify their existence and behavior in a certain way: that is, to appease them so that they will not do the mischief they would otherwise do. Thus we have, in Jameson's terms, not only the projection of a subtext but also its denial or negation : the “meaning” of the old woman's act is the harm or evil that, so long as the magic is successful, never gets expressed.

Magic and ritual provide useful examples, in turn, because they have the virtue of suggesting the sense in which all symbolic acts are "magical," what Burke points to in observing that a symbolic act wants to have an impact on the world while leaving the world untouched. The grounding of the act in the contradictions of an unexpressed subtext is not fully brought out, however, in the example of the peasant woman, so let us imagine a slightly more elaborate example, this time vaguely in the spirit of The Golden Bough : we know of a tribe that annually chooses a king from among its own number, feasts and pampers him through the summer and autumn and winter months, then slays him in the spring when the seed for that year's crop is put into the ground. The slaying is, let us further suppose, an altar ritual, with chants and prayers for the fertility of the coming harvest. What Jameson means by saying that the Real is inscribed in symbolic acts is evident here, as well as the sense in which it represents, and may be grasped by interpretation as, the imaginary solution of a real contradiction.

The sacrifice of the king is, obviously enough, ambiguous or paradoxical in Burke's sense: on the one hand it is a "merely" symbolic act--we know the amount of moisture in and the fertility of the soil, for example, are not going to be affected, as they would, say, by the genuine acts of irrigating the fields or mannring the groundsand yet on the other we are compelled to recognize it as an act : it is unintelligible except as an attempt designed to have an impact or work a charm upon the world. Then too we can immediately grasp what Jameson wonld call a contradiction at the formal or aesthetic level: this is a ritual in which there is an opposing and overwhelming tension between the actual sacrificial event (death, the end of life) and its sacerdotal context (chants and prayers for fertility or renewal of life). The contradiction, moreover, as something written right into the formal structure of the ritual, is available to purely immanent analysis.

The same formal contradiction occurs at another level as well, namely in the fact that this society does not simply take one of its number as the random victim of its annual sacrifice but goes through the ritual of choosing a king and allowing him a year of domination before he is put to death (we may imagine, if it makes the case more vivid, that the king during his year of rule exercises despotic power, even to the point where he may have others put to death). In such a case, the society would clearly be exploiting the semiotic potential of its own social structure (a "sign system" of "high" and "low" status) to maximize the value of the sacrifice and thus its value; an act of propitiation. Thus again we have a formal paradox of the "highest" member of a society being subjected the "lowest" fate of an involuntary deaths that is accessible purely formal analysis.

As a symbolic act, then, the sacrifice of the king clearly attempts to resolve at the imaginary level a real contradiction, which in this case is the dominant relation of nature (rainfall and the seasonal cycle, natural calamities like fire or flood, the leaching or salinization of the soil, etc.) to an agricultural society; this is the ultimate "relation of domination" lying behind those relations of domination in the social structure for which the sacrifice of the ruler may now be grasped as an act of atonement. In Marxist terms, then, the underlying contradiction occurs at the submerged or hidden level of Necessity: a mysterious and impersonal force ("nature") here "owns the means of production," and unless it behaves benevolently the tribe will starve; it is the intolerability of this threat that the sacrifice attempts to resolve or negate, and that must thus be reconstructed as the "subtext" of the ritual considered as a "text." Such reconstruction is possible because the ritual-as-text has inscribed within itself the Real.

At the same time, the meaning of History as an absent cause, something outside all ritual or narrative structures whatever, is that the "real contradiction" addressed by the text as a symbolic act is not that ultimate contradiction that in Marxist thought can only be resolved through "collective praxis"--that is, revolution. It is, rather, contradiction as it appears in ideological form, as an aporia or "antinomy" or irresolvable logical bind. In the case of our king sacrifice, for instance, this would doubtless be on the social or agricultural level what Hegel long ago saw as the paradox of sexual reproduction, that sexual consummation is a moment simultaneously of regeneration and of death, for the act that perpetuates the species by begetting new life also inevitably signals the mortality of its individual members. Such antinomies as this of death-in-birth are, for Jameson, what are addressed by such rituals as the tribal sacrifice of a king, such mythological narratives as that of Christian sacrifice, and such individual narratives as epic poems and novels produced within historical societies (124-6).

The last concept is that of the “horizon” (a term taken from Gadamer) of which Dowling states three forms: that “facts” count only against a background of beliefs; that the social order is conveived in terms of discourses (Dowling gives the example of the English Civil War, with ideology generating discourses, and, with a Bakhtinian influence, discourse being read in terms of dialogue, of parole and langue between the individual utterance, text and the discourses, with hegemonic ideology co-opting other voices or reabsorbing or “universalizing such opposition voices, thus perpetuating the illusion that there is only a single genuine culture” (132)); third, the horizon of history , which cannot be reduced to periods or epochs and discrete totalities, but inolves overdetermination, relative autonomy of levels of the superstructure, with different historical stages co-existing, leading to dominant and residual modes of production and so on - we cannot simply assign dates to periods, but must foreground “the passage to the surface of a structural antagonism or permanent struggle between the various modes of production coexisting within a given social formation (139).

One would assume this, especially in this last section, would answer whether or not the presence of a “political unconscious” necessitates Rosemary Jackson's argument “ideology is profoundly unconscious”; that is, is the content of the “political unconscious” ideology as a whole, or only the contradictions inherent in ideology, whereby ideology is both conscious and unconscious, or something else entirely? Given that Jameson uses Althusser's notion of ideology of the real relations between individuals and the mode of production, and given that he considers ideology not simply the “real relations” but the imaginary ways they are re-worked, for example in visible forms such as art, it would seem ideology is conscious. In the most obvious sense, we are aware of the content of ideology: “I believe in the family, in the individual, the state and justice” and what we are not aware of is that these notions are not universal but historically located and may hide a great deal of cultural oppression. Unfortunately, Dowling does not distinguish between the “political unconscious” and “ideology” per se , and while he discusses Jameson's use of Althusser, Freud and the unconscious, he does elaborate upon what would seem a fundamental connection in any introduction to a text titled The Political Unconscious (my italics) that concerns itself primarily with the work of ideology.