Anarchy in the Flesh: Conrad's "Counterrevolutionary" Modernism and the Witz of the Political Unconscious

TLDR: The authors argue that the politics of the literary text is a joke and that the jokes of a literary text are its politics, and that it is possible to read the political of a text as a series of jokes.

Abstract: I want το approach the question of \"The Politics of Modernism\" by way of a more general question about politics and literature: is it possible that the politics of the literary text is a joke? Or, to put it differently, that the jokes of the literary text are its politics? The question arises if we accept, at least in their general contours, two well-known arguments: Fredric Jameson's argument that \"the unmasking of cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts\" requires the assertion and analysis of a \"political unconscious\" at work in those artifacts (Political 21); and Freud's argument not so much for a particular psychoanalytic theory of Witz as for the centrality of Witz to psychoanalytic theory in general—his insistence on the \"wit of all unconscious processes\" (Weber 84).' Together these formulations seem to suggest that, read on the level of the political, that is, as a \"socially symbolic act,\" the literary text is encountered as a series of jokes. Just as important, they imply that the politics of the text has to be understood in terms of the \"joke-work\" it performs or enables—the redistribution of energies it effects through processes of \"condensation, displacement, indirect representation, and so on\" (Freud 95)— and not in terms of a stable and altogether \"serious\" partisanship.