Fredric Jameson: A Collection of Available Texts

Conveniently provided below is a compendium of texts by Jameson for your reading/studying pleasure:
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (with Edward Said) (1988)
Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (1998)
A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002)
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005)
The Modernist Papers (2007)
Aesthetics and Politics (with Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukรกcs) (2010)
The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit (2010)
Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader

Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation

Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation

Formats Available

.PDF

Excerpt from The Waste Product of Graduate Education:

The core of any redescription of the linkage between graduate education and the system of academic labor more generally has to begin by discarding the Fordist assumption that the situation of the doctoral degree holder can be grasped by a manufacturing analogy to production. Under casualization, it makes very little sense to view the graduate student as potentially a product for the job market: most graduate students are already laboring at the only academic job they’ll ever have. (Hence the importance for organized graduate student labor of inscribing the designation “graduate employee” in law and discourse.) From this standpoint, it has to be acknowledged that increasingly the holders of the doctoral degree are not so much the products of the graduate employee labor system as its by-products, insofar as that that labor system exists primarily to recruit, train, supervise, and legitimate the employment of nondegreed rather than degreed teachers. This is not to say that the system doesn’t produce and employ holders of the PhD, only that this operation has become secondary to its extraction of teaching labor from nondegreed persons, primarily graduate employees and former graduate employees now working as adjunct labor—as part-timers, full-time lecturers, postdocs, and so on. This essay argues that the organized graduate employee has a better description. Against the dominant second-wave heuristic of the “job market,” and as a corrective to the lapsed and too-often residual labor knowledge of the first wave of faculty unionism, a third wave of thinking about academic labor is emergent in the graduate employee union movement. While this emergent knowledge is based in the particular experience of casualization by two generations of graduate employees and former graduate employees, I hope in the next few pages to suggest that it is not only a better knowledge of the “local” circumstance of the graduate employee (because how can the graduate employee be localized, exactly? Every other “location” in the system, from perma-temp to university president, is filled by someone who has been a graduate employee) but, further, that this third wave is an emergent better knowledge of the labor system as a totality. Consistent with the insights of psychoanalytic Marxism, it is in the graduate employees’ character as incipient by-products, their understanding that the system’s constant pressure is not toward their incorporation but toward compelling their recognition that they must serve as the system’s indigestible remainder, that provides the partial standpoint from which we can most usefully and justly accept a description of the whole.

OTHER ESSAYS:

The “Informal Economy” of the Information University (Marc Bousquet)

How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation(Marc Bousquet)

Excerpt from the “Informal Economy”:

One of the reasons that graduate employees are so vocal is becausethe transformation of graduate education accomplished by the three-decade conversion of the university to a center of capital accumulation needs to be viewed as a profound form of ‘employer sabotage’—most graduate employees find that their doctorate does not represent the beginning but instead the end of a long teaching career: as I’ve observed in another venue, the ‘award’ of the doctoral degree increasingly represents a disqualification from teaching for someone who has already been teaching for a decade or more. In the course of re-imagining the graduate student as a source of informationalized labor, the academy has increasingly evacuated the professional-certification component of the doctoral degree (the degree plays a key role in the way professionals maintain a monopoly on professional labor; however, now that work formerly done by persons holding the degree is done by persons studying for the degree, the degree itself no longer represents entrance into the profession). The consequence of this evacuation is that the old Fordist sense of the doctoral recipient as the ‘product’ of graduate education has little meaning—instead, the degree holder must now be understood in systemic terms as the waste product of graduate education—not merely ‘disposable,’ but that which must be disposed of for the constantly-churning system of continuously-replaced student labor to function properly.

As much as we think we know about the modern university, very little has been said about what it’s like to work there. Instead of the high-wage, high-profit world of knowledge work, most campus employees—including the vast majority of faculty—really work in the low-wage, low-profit sphere of the service economy. Tenure-track positions are at an all-time low, with adjuncts and graduate students teaching the majority of courses. This super-exploited corps of disposable workers commonly earn fewer than $16,000 annually, without benefits, teaching as many as eight classes per year. Even undergraduates are being exploited as a low-cost, disposable workforce.

Marc Bousquet, a major figure in the academic labor movement, exposes the seamy underbelly of higher education—a world where faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates work long hours for fast-food wages. Assessing the costs of higher education’s corporatization on faculty and students at every level, How the University Works is urgent reading for anyone interested in the fate of the university. From page 21:

Under casualization [of academic labor], it makes very little sense to view the graduate student as potentially a “product” for a “market” in tenure-track jobs. For many graduate employees, the receipt of a Ph.D. signifies the end, and not the beginning, of a long teaching career. Most graduate students are already laboring at the only academic job they’ll ever have – hence, the importance for organized graduate student labor of inscribing the designation “graduate employee” in law and discourse.

From the standpoint of the organized graduate employee, the situation is clear. Increasingly, the holders of a doctoral degree are not so the products of the graduate-employee labor system as its by-products, insofar as that labor system exists primarily to recruit, train, supervise, and legitimate the employment of nondegreed students and contingent faculty.

As Andrew Ross (author of the highly-recommend “Mental Labor Problem” essay) puts it:

[T]he research university is behaving more and more like an adjunct to private industry in the “concentration of power upward into managerial bureaucracies, the abdication of research and productivity assessment to external assessors and funders … the pressure to adopt an entrepreneurial career mentality, and the erosion of tenure through the galloping casualization of the work force.

This is probably extremely relevant to a good portion of this blog’s followers and may prove a welcome eye-opener.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche

Formats Available

.PDF

The works of Friedrich Nietzsche have fascinated readers around the world ever since the publication of his first book more than a hundred years ago. As Walter Kaufmann, one of the world’s leading authorities on Nietzsche, notes in his introduction, “Few writers in any age were so full of ideas,” and few writers have been so consistently misinterpreted. The Portable Nietzscheincludes Kaufmann’s definitive translations of the complete and unabridged texts of Nietzsche’s four major works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche Contra Wagner and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In addition, Kaufmann brings together selections from his other books, notes, and letters, to give a full picture of Nietzsche’s development, versatility, and inexhaustibility.
—Edited and Translated by Walter Kaufmann

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Formats Available

.PDF

Among so many changes, I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle. Today we are rather inclined to ignore it; perhaps, in its time, it gave rise to too much inflated rhetoric; perhaps it has been attributed too readily and too emphatically to a process of “humanization”, thus dispensing with the need for further analysis. And, in any case, how important is such a change, when compared with the great institutional transformations, the formulation of explicit, general codes and unified rules of procedure; with the almost universal adoption of the jury system, the definition of the essentially corrective character of the penalty and the tendency, which has become increasingly marked since the nineteenth century, to adapt punishment to the individual offender? Punishment of a less immediately physical kind, a certain discretion in the art of inflicting pain, a combination of more subtle, more subdued sufferings, deprived of their visible display, should not all this be treated as a special case, an incidental effect of deeper changes? And yet the fact remains that a few decades saw the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view. The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared.
—Foucault, Discipline and Punish, I. Torture. 1. The Body of the Condemned

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Formats Available

.PDF 

Read Online

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

Formats Available

.PDF

Heraclitus is the tragic thinker. The problem of justice runs through his entire work. Heraclitus is the one for whom life is radically innocent and just. He understands existence on the basis of an instinct of play. He makes existence an aesthetic phenomenon rather than a moral or religious one. Thus Nietzsche opposes him point by point to Anaximander….Heraclitus denied the duality of worlds, ‘he denied being itself.’ he made an affirmation of becoming. We have to reflect for a long time to understand what it means to make an affirmation of becoming. In the first place it is doubtless to say that there is only becoming. No doubt it is also to affirm becoming. But we also affirm the being of becoming, we say that becoming affirms being or that being is affirmed in becoming. Heraclitus has tow thoughts which are like ciphers: according to one there is no being, everything is becoming; according to the other, being is the being of becoming as such. A working thought which affirms becoming and a contemplative thought which affirms the being of becoming. These two ways of thinking are inseparable, they are the thought of single element….For there is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity; neither multiplicity nor becoming are appearances or illusions. But neither are there multiple or eternal realities which would be in turn, like essences beyond appearance. Multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, essential transformation and constant symptom of unity. Multiplicity is the affirmation of unity; becoming is the affirmation of being. The affirmation of becoming is itself being, the affirmation of multiplicity is itself one. Multiple affirmation is the way in which the one affirms itself. [Heraclitus] saw no negativity in becoming, he saw precisely the opposite: the double affirmation of becoming and of the being of becoming–in short the justification of being. Heraclitus is obscure because he leads us to the threshold of the obscure: what is the being of becoming? What is the being inseparable from that which is becoming? Return is the being of that which becomes. Return is the being of becoming itself, the being which is affirmed in becoming. The eternal return as law of becoming, as justice and as being.


—Translated by Hugh Tomlinson

Jeffrey Nealon, Post-postmodernism, or, The logic of just-in-time capitalism

Jeffrey Nealon, Post-postmodernism, or, The logic of just-in-time capitalism

PDF 1

PDF 2

PDF 3

PDF 4

PDF 5

Post-Postmodernism begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era.

Post-Postmodernism surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses—everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today—when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation.

Introduction to this blog

Ebookcollective was a tumblr blog that was designated to distribute free leftist-related ebooks to educate the left in regards to theory. In many cases, the blog ended up helping lower-middle class students, who couldn't afford to buy these books or were afraid of possible malware or viruses when trying to find the book. It was also an intellectual center, a center where people learned about theory and were introduced with books that might enlighten them. Overall, it was a collective area and an example of socialist theory in work. Yes, it might be the internet, but the website was an example of socialism in work—with the end of privatization of leftist literature and a path towards creating class-conscious workers. With the fact that the capitalist atmosphere dominates the Tumblr site and the corporate minds behind the staff, it was deleted for “copyright infringement”, even though most of the published texts were hundred years old (which allows the text to be distributed publicly).

Tumblr staff has a record of not responding to the harassment tumblr users received on a regular basis, but quickly responds to the interest of the corporate welfare or for the bourgeoisie’s interest. It’s logically simple because of their interest in capitalist accumulation.

Even if the founders of the blog were Leninists (Trotskyists), all ebooks—whether it be anarchist to Maoist were allowed. As the blog expanded, other leftists—who were Maoists, anarchists, etc., contributed to the blog. Even if we disagreed vastly with the theories, it was a collective site where people were given the option to uphold whatever they pleased.

But if the founders were Trotskyists, why would they give permission to uphold ebooks that were against the Leninist foundations? It’s not like the founders necessarily agreed with the theories, but rather they remembered what Lenin said in <i>What is to be Done?</i>, “Without any revolutionary theory, there cannot be any revolutionary practice”. Even as Bolshevik-Leninists, we must be enlightened and be well-versed in all theories, so that we can prove continuously for its erroneous mistakes—like what Marx, Engles, Lenin and Trotsky did. Lenin said famously in <em>The Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism</em>, “The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true”. Of course it is! However, as Marxists, we must prove that it is true, and why it is true with dialectical materialist analysis. We can’t arrogantly say that it is true without backing up with a materialist analysis. We wouldn’t be even considered Marxists, but a petty-bourgeois leftist who blabbers more than reads!

We want to create an anti-capitalist atmosphere by giving access to workers free ebooks. In reality, people can’t really afford to buy Das Kapital from their local bookstore or end up receiving a fine from the library for an overdue Das Kapital! We must understand that the bourgeoisie has privatized education as such that it’s only accessible for the bourgeoisie, which leaves the proletariat ignorant, hence adapting the philistine culture of capitalism. Not all workers were born with Engels’ Principles of Communism attached to their backs! Class-consciousness is not something tangible, where it can be inserted in one’s brain, but it’s a self-identity the proletariat must find—reading being one of the options.

This blog is not to create a reflection of the successful attempt to create a centralized location of leftist literature, but to further expand our blog. As of now, there is an Ebookcollective in Farsi and in Bengali—thanks to our Persian and Bengali comrades. By, allowing comrades to participate and contribute, regardless of the theory, is a step forward to a socialist revolution and democratic centralism in praxis.

As for many, Ebookcollective was an attempt in universaling free leftist literature—but don’t give up on the site yet! There are and will be several attempts in creating the new one. As of now, we have moved to blogspot, where we expect not to violate any bourgeois perspective of copyright infringement.

The neoliberal cult that has actively suppressed numerous of sites that have been dedicated to distributing media exemplifies the contradictions of capitalism. Of course, we Marxists are well-versed with the concept of M-C-M’ and how it is being applied to the printing/publishing press; we understand the whole vulgar concept that ‘the authors are workers—rather being mental workers than physical’. But then we must realize that authors are being extracted surplus value for the capitalists to accumulate capital. One of the absurdities of capitalism include the fact that not paying for the commodity (books) but rather than ‘stealing it online’ is a violation. What people neglect is that the writers are being paid less not because it’s free online, but the corporate profit over the surplus value produced in writing it. With the bourgeois democracy in taken, illegitimate laws are formed to defend the corporate—creating the allusion that it’s the author’s rights.

Nevertheless, our struggle to create a centralized location for leftist literature will continue and it will be always on the proletariat side!

If you are interested in contributing to the blog, please email us at <a href="mailto:ebookcollective@gmail.com">ebookcollective@gmail.com</a> as of now. We will soon find an option for open submission. Thank you.