Abstract

Fredric Jameson's exacting essay, "The Symbolic Interference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis" Critical Inquiry 4 [Spring 1978]: 507-23) moves me to comment. I shall apply one of my charges of my title to him, he applies the other to me. The matter is further complicated by the fact that there is a distance at which they are hard to tell apart. For any expression of something implies a repression of something else, and any statement that goes only so far is analyzable as serving to forestall a statement that goes farther. And I can't go as far as I think if I share with Jameson what I take to be his over-investment in the term "ideology." . . . the line between the implicit and the explicit being so wavering, there are many cases where the distinctions between conscious and unconscious become correspondingly blurred. But the kind of methodological repression that is implicit in Jameson's hermeneutic model can be wasteful beyond necessity. For it encourages him to be so precociously prompt in his "rereading" of a text that he doesn't allow his readers to read a single sentence of it. He doesn't tell them what Sinn, in its own terms, my text has on the subject of "ideology," "mystification," and the "unconscious." Instead, he cuts corners and settles for a report of the Bedeutung that it has for him. In this case the procedure is particularly wasteful because Jameson is highly intelligent, and if it weren't for the bad leads of his models he's the last man in the world who would have to be so bluntly inaccurate as he is on this occasion. I believe that he could put me through quite a trying ordeal if he could have but kept on the subject and pursued me accordingly. Kenneth Burke's previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes" , "Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" , " Motion/ Action" , and a hermeneutic fantasy, "A Critical Load . . ." . He would like us to mention that William Willeford, the interlocutor of a section in " Motion/ Action," is a professor of English at the University of Washington