New Left Review Balakrishnan on Jameson Valences of Dialectic

8/6/2019 New Left Review Balakrishnan on Jameson Valences of Dialectic

1/23

new left review 66 nov dec 2010 31

gopal ba lakr ishnan

Af t e r so many groundbreaking variations on the theme, itwill perhaps not come as a surprise that new material romFredric Jameson o ers yet another occasion to think aboutwhat it means to historicize. 1 Conceived as a urther instal-

ment in a series named The Poetics o Social Forms,the latest collection o essays expands upon a complex o problems that rst came together inThe Political Unconscious, which was the ountainhead o a whole body o work on the ideologies o narrative orm. Building on his earlier summao inter-war Marxist literary criticism, Marxism and Form , Jameson here

took on board post-war intellectual ormations that had long stood at adistance, and even in opposition to, this traditionstructuralism, or-malism and hermeneutics, to name only a ew. In the heyday o Theory,Jameson moved above the polemics that once divided its many schools,gleaning paradoxical ideological patterns that, in his view, only an abso-lute historicism was in a position to recognize.

While The Political Unconsciouswas still an exercise o literary criticism

semiotic analyses o the narrative ideologies o Balzac, Gissing andConradthe horizon o Jamesons work had already turned outward tothe cultural logic o a suddenly expanding world-system whose emblem-atic arte acts were more o ten architectural and cinematic than textual.The novel retained some o its previous signi cance, but increasingly inthe orm o writing ar removed rom the canons o French Studies andComparative Literature. Driving this turn towards new cultural orma-tions was an ambitious attempt to theorize the historical signi cance

o a strange new aesthetics that seemed to con ound an older opposi-tion o modernism and realism, the once imposing alternatives o the LukcsBrecht debate. In a climate o growing suspicion towards

THE COMING CONTRADICTION

On JamesonsValences o the Dialectic


2/23

32 nlr 66totalization, Jameson can be seen to have pulled o an improbable intel-lectual coup, establishing a broadly Hegelian-Marxist understanding o awidely, i inchoately, experienced postmodernism, while conjoining thismutation in the superstructure to a new phase o capitalist expansionand intensi cation. Older orms o narrative mimesis and their avant-garde negations were ading out, revealing a seemingly limitless globalsensorium o simultaneity and juxtaposition. In this epochal light, wecould see The Poetics o Social Formsas proposing a variation on Hegelshistoricist adagePhilosophy is its own time li ted to thought or ourpostmodern condition: theory is the unrepresentable limits o the world-system li ted to the level o a orm-problem.

What is dialectics?

The opposition o orm and content preoccupied an older generation o literary critics. The Marxists among them tended to conceive o this duothrough some o the central paired concepts o historical materialism,ultimately in terms o the elusive relationship o consciousnessmoreprecisely, categories o thought and experienceto the unsolvable pre-dicaments imposed by di erent modes o social being. Jameson has

never stopped exploring the interpretative possibilities o the intersectiono Marxism and ormalism that his own criticism has come to de ne: theworld mapped by a novel, the virtual presence within it o an externalworld-systemic situation, the narrative schemes that mediate this inside-outside relationship, and the ideologies that manage the pivotal momentso incoherence and ailure o this mediation. But whereas other essays o Jamesons chart the topology o this exterior worldits intercalation o metropolitan, provincial and colonial zones, its hierarchical articulation

o synchronic modes o productionthose in Valencesare more inclinedto peer into the deep time o the world-system: its origins and ultimatepassage towards some still unimaginable other orm o society. I the lat-est collection could be said to have a literary preoccupation, it might behow an analysis o the narrative ordering o succession and simultaneity,

uturity and retroactivity, inception and closure, parts and wholes canopen out into new ways o thinking about what the historical once was,and the orms o its contemporary erasure and convolution.

Historicity remains the locus classicuso dialectical problems. In the con-cluding ootnote o a long introductory chapter that explores some o the

1 Fredric Jameson, Valences o the Dialectic , London and New York 2009.


3/23

balakrishnan: Jameson 33various ways in which the term dialectic has been understood, Jamesonpresents a use ul overview o the contents o the entire collection:

The chapters on Hegel seek to establish a di erent case or his actuality than

the one normally o ered (or rejected). The second o those chapters, and thesucceeding ones, examine some o the contemporary philosophical classics

rom a dialectical perspective, and also to make a case or the renewed inter-est o Lukcs and Sartre today. A series o shorter discussions then seek toclari y various themes in the Marxian tradition, rom cultural revolution tothe concept o ideology; ollowed by a series o political discussions, which,while documenting my personal opinions on topics ranging rom the col-lapse o the Soviet Union to globalization, nonetheless claim to demonstratethe relevance o the dialectic or practical politics. In a long nal section,which con ronts Ricoeurs monumental study o history and narrative, Isupplement this work by supplying the dialectical and Marxian categoriesmissing rom it, without which History today can scarcely be experienced. 2

Across this topical diversity, the dialectic emerges as the name or thevarious ways in which we can think and experience what our categoriesseem to place out o reach, but which sometimes appear back to us inthe orm o obscure objects o contradictory predication. One examplestands out as particularly illustrative o the mythical operations o the

contemporary pense sauvage. Globalization has made the world evermore homogeneous; on the contrary, it is a situation o unprecedenteddi erentiation and hybridization. Our current spontaneous under-standing o the world compels our assent to claims that would appearto rule each other out. In the broadest sense in which Jameson usesthe term, dialectics then is a orm o thought that accords a privilegedsigni cance to situations in which the logical pattern o our accountso the world generate aporias, antinomies and, nally, outright contra-

dictions. The Aristotelian axiom o non-contradiction articulates theundamental premise o sel -sameness in the ordinary experience o what is, as encountered in particular experiential contexts according toparticular directions o concern. Its logical necessity is there ore subjectto the strenuous conditions o human existence in this upright, coher-ent mode. 3 This might give us a better sense o why Marx thought that acontradiction- ree account o the real premises, the conditions o possi-bility o a certain mode o existence could not be articulated by those who

2 Valences, pp. 6970.3 Aristotle, Metaphysics,iv , 4. Heidegger comments: Aristotle expresses this briefyas ollows: i what is said in the axiom did not hold, then human beings would sinkto the level o a plant, that is, they could not exist at all in language and in the under-standing o Being. Martin Heidegger, Being and Truth, Bloomington 2010, p. 46.


4/23

34 nlr 66were compelled to reproduce these premises in their ongoing attemptsto resolve the interpretative and practical problems that li e in this orminvariably poses. This is the reason why crises in the logical pattern o the relationship o words and things can disclose the speci cally histori-cal shape o the insoluble problems at the heart o a certain mode o li e.The experience o such limit-situations might even allow us to pre- guresome determinate notional shapes o what lies beyond our immediatepractical, generational or even epochal horizon. For Jameson, then,dialectic is an orientation that continually translates this experience o

nitude back into upsurges o transcendence, taking the orm not o the solution o already existing problems, but rather o the generation o new problems out o the partial neutralization o old ones.

Reanimating Hegel

Hegels idealism was an attempt to problematize the traditional catego-ries o understanding, inherited rom Aristotle and taken up by Kant assimply given, by thinking about their conditions o possibility.

In Aristotle and Kant, the categories are inventoried and sorted out accord-ing to various classi cation schemes, but they cannot be said to have beeninterpreted, exactly, since they do not have meaning in and o themselvesbut rather govern and organize meanings and to that degree stand outsideo meaning as such. 4

Hegel sought to demonstrate how the modes and orms o thoughthave a logic o their own to which we all victim i we are unaware o their existence and their in orming infuence on us. It ollowed thatthe faws in a given categorythe way in which it comes to be entan-

gled, or example, in a mani estly unsatis ying dualism or de nitionalcircularityare already indices o a concrete historical situation. AsLukcs once observed, Hegels trans ormation o categorical problemsinto historical ones opened the way to Marxism. O course, this con-ception o the passage rom Hegel to Marx would seem immediately toexclude the understanding o dialectics popularized by Friedrich Engels:a monistic vision o a human history un olding within a boundless,confict-driven fux o nature. The latter view posited an unproblem-

atic identity o thought and being, as i our orms o thought merelyrefect, in more or less adequate ways, realitys iron laws o antagonisticdevelopment. Beginning with Lukcs, Western Marxism recoiled rom

4 Valences, p. 283.


5/23

balakrishnan: Jameson 35this conception o materialism, o thought as the mirror o nature, byinsisting on the non-identity, the ri t between categories and being,and the structural trans ormations that would be needed to bring aboutsome orm o their reconciliation. From this perspective, both naive real-ism (identity) and, in a reversion to Kant, the many ways o assumingsome absolute incommensurability (non-identity) between our orms o thought and the world, prevent any recognition o the unavoidably his-torical problems o the opposition and unity o these terms.

The main anti-dialectical currents o postwar French thought came tosee Hegelian notions o totality, mediation and the subject as a sorto philosophical straitjacket. Against these, there arose the desire orconceptualities loosened rom the strictures o common sense andmeta physical reassurance, along lines indicated by either mathemat-ics or some variant o literary ultra-modernism: the ormalization o structures without a subject, the never-ending deconstruction o the

oundational rhetorics o philosophy, various genealogies o epistemicbreaks, disjunctive syntheses o the empirical and transcendental, and so

orth. But such apparently anti-dialectical orientations were all attemptsto escape the ideological circularity o metaphysical rei cations; that is,

to achieve what Hegel in his own time had sought to bring into ques-tion, but which he then too hastily presumed to be solved by speculativeidentity claims. But the terminology o Hegelian philosophyor thato any other philosophical systemis not itsel dialectical. In order toreanimate this potential in Hegels philosophy, we must abandon itscrowning syntheses and sterile culminations, and embrace the sel -undermining tendencies o the spirit o contradiction.

How, then, should we distinguish this unsystematic dialectic o ailures,o critical and hermeneutic operations on contingent ideological prob-lems, rom an earlier conception o negative dialectics or, or that matter,

rom deconstruction itsel ? All three, Jameson suggests, could be seenas variants o equipollence: the ancient sceptical art o setting up equallystrong propositions or arguments on both sides o an issue, with the aimo exposing the dubiousness o any proposed synthesis or conclusion.The implacable negativity o thoughts sel -criticism o ten becomes or

Jameson, as it did or Adorno and Derrida, a placeholder or various g-ures o the absolute, appearing as the trace o a now oreclosed prospecto utopian reconciliation. I deconstruction and the dialectic are both


6/23

36 nlr 66ways o staging the structural incoherence o would-be oundationalclaims and de nitions, the dialectic pauses, waiting or a new solutionto reeze over and become an idea and ideology to which the dialectic canthen again be applied, while deconstruction races orward to unravel thenew result as well. 5

Dialectics, then, is not simply negative or critical, but also a more a rm-ative hermeneutic o the ideologies, projects and worlds that struggleto surmount their speci c, constitutive nitude. One suspects that thereason why Heidegger has come to assume an ever more prominentplace in Jamesons work is that both his phenomenology and his laterarchaeology o metaphysics advanced in anticipation o an impend-ing breakthrough to new ways o thinking, the shadowy intimations o which might already be detected in the recaptured original assumptionsbehind philosophical key words and ragments. This openness to themost controversial side o Heideggers thought comes out o a historiciz-ing interest in the ideological orms o various politics o truthperhapsin particular, the decisionism to which all radical new movements seemto give riseconjoined to an utterly impassive, defationary understand-ing o truth itsel . Indeed, on the question o Das Wesen der Warheit, he

seems to stand diametrically opposed to Alain Badiou, maintaining inan earlier work that in this history, all truths are also at once and at thesame time ideological, and should be celebrated with the greatest suspi-cion and vigilance. 6 Badious lo tier conception o Philosophy stands inillustrative contrast to what Jameson means by Theory:

Theory . . . has no vested interests inasmuch as it never lays claim to anabsolute system, a non-ideological ormulation o itsel and its truths;indeed, always itsel complicit in the being o current language, it has onlythe never-ending, never- nished task and vocation o undermining phi-losophy as such, o unravelling a rmative statements and propositionso all kinds.7

But i this ormulation leans heavily in the direction o a purely critical,even deconstructive conception o theory, its meaning is supplementedby others in which Marxism is understood as grounded in the convic-tion that genuinely new concepts will not be possible until the concrete

situation, the system itsel , in which they are to be thought, has beenradically modi ed. 8 The basic assumption behind this conception o

5 Valences, p. 27. 6 Jameson, The Seeds o Time, New York 1994, p. 77.7 Valences, p. 59. 8 Valences, p. 135.


7/23

balakrishnan: Jameson 37theory is that our inherited philosophical categories are essentially dead,but can be rewritten into the present with a certain e ective a terli e,as the terms o their own possible supersession. The relation betweenTheory, Marxism and Dialectic is never de nitively settled in theseessays, suggesting that these are the not-quite-right names or variousways o taking stock and probing beyond the deadlocks o thought andpraxis, amidst a long transitional era to another mode o li e.

Genealogies

Kants great discovery was that the human mind is limited in what it canthink. In the context o the themes o Valences, his attempted demon-stration o the impossibility o thinking about the origins and end o theworld in an adequate way can be seen to assume a special signi cance.More concretely, Rousseau posed the same problem or any narrativeo the origins o language: while it was impossible to think that lan-guage came into existence all at once, it seemed barely conceivable thatit had evolved incrementally. What was at stake, o course, was not theevident act o such changes, but our capacity to think about them withsu cient clarity. Be ore Nietzsche, then, Rousseau can be said to have

pioneered the genealogical approach to the enigma o the emergence o whole orders o things that implicitly teleological narratives o origina-tion cannot properly account or.

Genealogy, according to Jameson, was meant to lay in place the vari-ous logical preconditions or the appearance o a given phenomenon,without in any way implying that they constituted the latters causes,let alone the latters antecedents or early stages. 9 The point is not that

narrative should be replaced by genealogies in this sense, but rather thatthe latter can bring out the conceptual operations that the narrative ormo historywith its assumption o a continuous, enveloping logic o aworld within which developments are held to un oldnot only cannot

ully address but actually has to conceal. The problem internal to anyaccount o how new logics, or how new, unenveloped worlds come intobeingthe origins o language, o the state or o capitalismis the neces-sity o establishing how the conditions o those origins were somehow

present in the anterior situation, generating the urther problem o uncontrollable regress (the conditions o those conditions etc.), to which

9 Valences, p. 434.


8/23

38 nlr 66only the quasi-teleology o a posited, usually nameless transitional periodcan provide a solution. Elsewhere Jameson has noted that this is:

a conundrum which only the concept o positing can e ectively address:

or just as we always posit the anteriority o a nameless object along withthe name or idea we have just articulated, so also in the matter o historicaltemporality we always posit the preexistence o a ormless object which isthe raw material o our emergent social or historical situation. 10

Retreating rom these aporias, Lvi-Strauss maintained that the dia-chronic (change and history) is neither meaning ul nor thinkable, butthe result o a series o accidents, which was his way o saying that quali-tative changes o synchronic statestheir origins, ends and transitionalmomentsare stumbling blocks to our ordinary conceptions o timeas a homogeneous sequence o nows. For Jameson, these problemsunderscore the impossibility o articulating any homogeneous accounto timewhether naturalistic or phenomenologicalbecause theypoint to the existence o quasi-transcendental conditions o experience,themselves subject to ageing and historical change, that ail to appearin the li e world o that experience, or do so in the orm o a contradic-tion. Arguably, then, this conception o genealogy remains too narrowly

ocused on the problem o structural genesis to comprehend the way inwhich the decline and end o certain worlds also de y representation.

It might come as a surprise that a gure as steeped in Marx as Jamesonwould bypass, in the context o refections on the disjunction betweensynchronic and diachronic dimensions o temporality, Marxs owninquiry into the social process o mediation between the cyclically repro-duced structural conditions and the empirical experience o a certain

orm o counting time, i.e. the value orm itsel . A ter all, in volume 1o Capital Marx demonstrates how this orm mani ests itsel as a divi-sion within socially standardized working days between necessary andsurplus labour time that ultimately appears as a contradiction in soci-etys experience o the epochal limits o capitalist growth. While theconcluding, previously unpublished essay o Valenceseventually swoopsdown on this very contemporary problem, it does so a ter a long, spi-ralling digression through literary and philosophical refections on how

Time and History have been conceived in a number o traditions arremoved rom Marxism.

10 Jameson, The Hegel Variations, London and New York 2010, pp. 856.


9/23

balakrishnan: Jameson 39Was war die Zeit?

The penultimate section o Valences o ers a generous commentary onPaul Ricoeurs Time, Memory and Forgetting , beginning with a considera-tion o the opposition o Aristotelian and Augustinian conceptions o time; that is to say, roughly, the naturalistic and subjective understand-ings o it. This opposition between the classical philosopher and the lateRoman theologian has ormed a point o departure or numerous dis-courses on the phenomenon o time, and overlaps with the oppositiono temps and dure introduced by Bergson:

st augustine : What then is time? I no one asks me about it, I know; i Iam supposed to explain it to one who asks, I do not know. 11

aristotle : Time is the number o motion in respect to be ore and a ter. 12

However striking the apparent opposition o subjective to objec-tive in these ormulations, Heidegger reminds us that this may itsel be anachronistic. Aristotles pithier de nition turns out not to be sostraight orward, or in re erring time back to motion, time ultimatelycomes to be indexed to what in his view was the purest, most auton-

omous orm o motion, that o the soul itsel , reckoning with time.For Jameson, Aristotles attempt at a de nition actually demonstratesthe impossibility o de ning time, except circularly, and there ore theneed somehow to show it. A passage rom Heidegger conveys a similarunderstanding o the purpose o Aristotles de nition o time, seen asnot a de nition in the academic sense. It characterizes time by de n-ing how what we call time becomes accessible. It is an access defnitionor access characterization.13

What it gives access to, when properly understood, is our habitual com-portment towards time, the compulsions o guiding onesel accordingto it: we are directed towards what occupies us, what presses hardupon us, what it is time or, what we want to have time or. 14 Comingtoward, going back to, staying with: temporality is this very external-izing, projecting, horizon- orming comportment. For Heidegger, theetymology o key philosophical terms in classical languages promised

to disclose concealed networks and silent histories o thought that could11 Con essions, Bk 11, Ch. 14. 12 Physics, Bk 4, Pt 11.13 Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems o Phenomenology,Bloomington 1988, p. 257.14 Heidegger, Basic Problems o Phenomenology, p. 259.


10/23

40 nlr 66not otherwise be brought to light. I this assumption has become lesspersuasive today, perhaps it could be acceptedwith the license thatdialectical speculation seems to permit itsel as a way o indicatingthe possible implications between terms that would otherwise standin mute isolation, in this case the relationship between temporality,existence, appearing or, alternately, worlds. In Greek ekstatikon meansstepping outside-itsel , in Latin existeremeans standing orth, appearing.Temporality, Heidegger suggests, can be understood as this intrinsicexteriority o existence. This outside-itsel ness is a mode o appearingin a pre-given, implicitly meaning ul world, whose labours and trans-actions are oriented to various common senses o temporality. Whilehe celebrated Aristotles Rhetoric as the rst systematic hermeneuticso the everydayness o collective being, Heidegger thereby consignedit to being a phenomenology o inauthenticity, that is, o the ordinaryroutines o disavowing our most authentic possibilities, or abstaining

rom some unspeci ed historical mission. This characterization o theirresolute, vicarious texture o everyday li e inevitably raised expecta-tions that there were, by contrast, other moments when the nitude o things transparently stood orth, in the light o unmixed Time itsel the mirage o parousia.

For Jameson, deconstructive scepticism towards such excesses neverrules out a sympathetic hermeneutic o what such gurations o theAbsolute might disclose about our historical situation. Heidegger pro-vides a way o thinking about how change in our mode o existencethevery condition o the way things appearcan itsel be made to appearin everyday phenomenological terms, with due allowance or the neces-sary quotient o antasy and misrecognition entailed in this mediation o

barely commensurable transcendental and empiricalalternately, his-torical and existentialplanes.

Addressing the inability o the o cial Marxism o the 1950s to com-prehend the still irreducible lived experience o contemporaries withinthe exhausted dogmas o its theory o history, Sartre proposed that thedialectical knowing o man, according to Hegel and Marx, demandsa new rationality within experience, in the absence o which the his-

torical situation has become completely opaque in East and West alike.What are the conditions o this translucency o experience within whichhistoricity as such could be mani ested? Pre-empting Kierkegaardslater criticism o him, Hegel once argued that our situation is radically


11/23

balakrishnan: Jameson 41di erent rom that o the Greeks, in that they had rst o all to gen-erate usable abstractions out o the immanence o empirical daily li e;we, however . . . are drowning in abstractions, we have to nd a way o getting out o them. 15 This way out is unlikely to be ound in the et-ishized authenticity o solitary li ethe Kierkegaardian solutionbutmust now, under conditions o the ever more intensive socialization o experience, be pursued in an opposite, Marxist direction, towards anawareness o how even our a ective states and passionate commitmentsare dependent on the labour o other people and on a social di erentia-tion o production within which those particular human possibilities areavailable or on the other hand excluded. 16

The corollary o this conception is that the experiential is no longer whatlies within a circumscribed phenomenological horizon around us but hasbecome ever more scrambled by distant and even absent spaces, withina capitalist world-system opening up virtual possibilities o experiencewhich are not straight orwardly present in our quotidian surroundings.But this mode o production, violently un olding rom some remote pre-history, is also heading toward some unknown ate, and in every phaseo its expansion this scrambling o all that was solid opens up rontiers

o experience in which these virtual possibilities assume a speci c cul-tural shape that enigmatically marks its structuring contradictions andouter limits: postmodernism as the cultural logic o late capitalism.

Categories and concepts

Recalling the original project o The Poetics o Social Forms, we cometo the question o the narrative categories through which History itsel

might be made mani est in experience, that is to say, the narrative ormthrough which the origins and sel -undermining universalization o capitalism can be subjectivized. This Lukcsian problem o the sub-jectivization o what the Althusserians used to call natural-historicalprocesses without a subject can be seen as the ultimate contradiction o dialectics. By the end o the 1970s, Jameson had come to the view thatolder realist orms o the historical novel could no longer mediate whathad become an unrepresentablewhich is not to say untheorizableri t

between an un olding contradiction in socio-historical conditions andthe increasingly worldless milieu o contemporary Dasein. He argued

15 Quoted in Valences, p. 283. 16 Valences, p. 206.


12/23

42 nlr 66that the narrative orms o the realist novel presupposed a backgroundstream o continuous historical development out o recognizable origins,a li e experience unique to the industrializing nations o nineteenth-century capitalism, o the gradual dissolution o older pre-capitalistGemeinscha teno traditional village li e and their replacement, withinthe unity o a single li etime and a single biographical experience, by thenascent industrial city. 17

Contrary to a common misconception, Jamesons own understanding o historicity calmly accepted structuralist and post-structuralist criticismso grand narratives even while holding ast to the commitment to alwayshistoricize. But what, then, did the term mean, i it could no longer betaken as a hermeneutic orm o understanding that put events into somemeaning ul story o development or placed arte acts back into their pastcultural contexts? While re erences to Nietzsche have dropped out o hiswritings since the 80s, in a text rom the early 90s Jameson o ered anovel reinterpretation o the nausea the ormer elt or the historicismo his ageabout the way in which one mode gave way to another, howa civilization broke down, how Rome declined, how some other social

orm will eventually take the place o the current one. 18 He proposed

that the disgust o the epigone to which Nietzsche gave vent could nowbe seen as one o a gamut o a ects that could conceivably galvanize aspeci c mode o hermeneutic contact with the cultural past, going so aras to suggest that this insight might provide the model or an alternative,un amiliar historicism, ar rom the discredited, organic ideologies o origins, progress and decay.

What seems to interest Jameson in Ricoeurs last work on the narrative

phenomenology o time was the use he made o Aristotles descriptionso tragedy as a laying-out o the essential orms o all stories. But thesigni cance o Aristotles Poetics or Jameson is arguably not what it was

or Ricoeur, who conceived o it as an all-purpose ramework or makingsense o the readers experience o the ollowability o narratives, evenones that, in their labyrinthine complexity and multiplicity o levels, seemto de y uni cation into the orm o a plot. What Jameson, by contrast, hastaken rom the Poeticsis something altogether di erent, namely the pos-

sibility that Aristotles account o the elements o tragedy could somehow17 Jameson, Marxism and Historicism (1979), in The Ideologies o Theory, Londonand New York 1988, p. 459.18 Benjamins Readings (1992), in Ideologies o Theory, p. 240.


13/23

balakrishnan: Jameson 43take us out o the world o individualistic points o view inscribed in thenarrative conventions o the modern novel, and premised on amiliarsocio-historical milieux. Jameson suggests that the problem with suchdeep-seated points o view is that they set up an imaginary moral cosmoso protagonist and adversary that can be o no use to us as we set out todiscover some new, non-anthropomorphic subjects o history. The sup-position o the last essay in Valencesis that a classical understanding o anarchaic, pre-individualistic world o ate, a time be ore modern ideologi-cal articulations o the historical had settled into their amiliar moulds,might allow us to grasp some o the contemporary, post-individualistic

orms o its appearance. Pre- or post-individualistic concepts, Jamesonwrites, are more appropriate or the contemplation o the multiple pastso human history, a process without a subject which no witness and noAbsolute Spirit could encompass. 19

The three Aristotelian concepts that Jameson takes over romRicoeur peripeteia, anagnorisisand pathos: reversal, disclosure and,as he will interpret it, the absoluteare at least rudimentary enoughto have the appearance o universality. The process o reversal makesvisible how people all under the power o ate, and captures the dia-

lectical unity o victory and de eat, the most primitive terms throughwhich the pattern o something we could call history, or a prototype o it, becomes legible. He draws on David Quints study o Virgils Aeneid,the 1993 Epic and Empire, to convey how an identity o these oppositeswas at work behind the Augustan triumphalism o the epic poem, set-ting the template or later variations and inversions. The sub-text ora terthought o the imperialist epic turns out to be something like: YouRoman victors, never orget that you are also the miserable losers and

re ugees o de eat and o the loss o your city and country! Within thisreversal and dialectical identity o victory and de eat lies a tragic concepto ate, a gure o the uni ying necessity implacably expressing itsel in

actional stri e and the fuctuating tides o war. The classical articulationo this spectacle o destiny was Thucydidess The Peloponnesian War .Across the distance that separates this Attic micro-world rom our post-modern universe, this conception o historicity as necessity must stillbe ours, however much it must be grasped in terms o oppositions not

yet available to the Greek historian, such as the potential or exhaustiono modes o production.20

19 Valences, p. 551. 20 Valences, p. 590.


14/23

44 nlr 66Reversal within an implacable uni ying logic o necessity is, o course,the story orm assumed by Marxs structural account o a capitalismdriven to surmount its limits, eventually capsizing into another,un oreseen social order, or, with less anticipation o any particular out-come, o capitalism as simultaneously the most emancipating and themost disastrous situation that has ever be allen human beings, express-ing a sort o primal ambivalence o the Good and Bad with no apparentpractical resolution. For Jameson, Marxism is not just an account o thegenesis and structural limits o capitalism, ambiguously situated withina broader millennial sketch o the variety and succession o di erentmodes o production, nor simply a critical theory o the untenable lim-its and contradictions o thought and experience determined by thesemodes, but also a hermeneutic o the mythologies that all collectivesrely upon to interpret the meaning o su ering and the possibilitieso its transcendence.

Earlier on in Valences, in one o two essays on Sartre, Jameson observesthat, just as theology needs to account or evil and su ering in a worldotherwise attributed to God, so any conceptually satis ying philosophyo history needs to account or violence and ailure in some meaning ul

way, rather than as a series o accidents that all outside o meaning. 21 Inthis new human age o modernity that begins with capitalism, explana-tion and critique still come to be inextricably entangled in myth, withina wider dialectic o enlightenment. Philosophies o history should thennot be understood as explanatory or critical theories but rather as secu-larized antasies o the opposed destinations that history has appeared tobe heading towards rom the dawn o bourgeois society: emancipationor some new orm o barbarism; utopia or extinction. Accordingly, the

meaning o history rom early to post-modernity has been experiencedin the opposed valences o Enthusiasm and Horror, as attunements tothese starkly opposed destinations, where the intensi cation o one orthe other o these two a ects signals the passage o empirical experiencesinto transcendental ones; that is to say, into a sense o the permanentpossibilities or constraints on what human beings can trans orm andcreate through their own collective e orts.

In ar-o Knigsberg, Kant pondered the signi cance o the FrenchRevolution in terms o the enthusiasm it evoked amongst all thosewho were at least open to the idea that servitude was not the natural

21 Valences, p. 232.


15/23

balakrishnan: Jameson 45lot o humankind. Such a phenomenon in human history is not to be

orgotten, he wrote, indexing the sudden appearance o a vast, uncharteddomain o autonomy that would soon provoke obscurantist horror. Butthe counter-revolutionary hysteria o de Maistre was merely derivative and

ailed to give rise to any epoch-de ning vision o history. The dialecticalpossibilities o horror as an attunement to the barbarism at the gates o civilization only arrive with the shocking, protracted emergence o a newworking-class condition in actories and slums. Jameson o ers a memora-ble description o the peripeteia rom bourgeois revolutionary enthusiasmo the late 18th century to the proletarian standpoint on the nascent worldo capital within which yet a urther dialectical reversal un olds:

As we approach, in the eighteenth century, that more democratic age thatcapitalism began to open in the West, a new preoccupation with impris-onment, tyranny and despotism, arbitrary punishment, anaticism andsuperstition, begins to infect political passion, and to prepare the over-throw o the old regimes. Yet the installation o parliamentary systems anda relative political equality only serves to shi t the horror and to disclose thedeeper perspective o labour as such, o the actory as prison, as a li elongtoil, which then retroactively illuminates the time o the labouring body ina new and perhaps more salvational perspective. 22

Disclosures

The second o the three terms in Ricoeurs Aristotelian dramaturgy isanagnorisis, the recognition o the other as the samean event- orm roman archaic time preceding the oundations o the polis, when a swornenemy that turned out to be ones own kinsman was the stu o legend.For Jameson, this conception o disclosure indicates another mode

through which History itsel might be thought to make an appearance,as the estranging mise-en-scneo unincorporated multitudes suppressedrom the ordinary eld o vision. The reason we are now compelled to

con ront this problem o historicity in the orm o the appearance o obscure multitudes is that, unlike in the age o classical Marxism, thecurrent dynamics o capitalism do not seem spontaneously to constitutesuch populations into the recognizable gure o a proletariat illuminatedagainst the backdrop o an acknowledged social question. Marx named

and identi ed a working class already in the process o becoming visiblein the rst mode o production which was purely economic in structure,and which did not any longer in that sense need to be discovered. 23

22 Valences, p. 590. 23 Valences, p. 568.


16/23

46 nlr 66The epochal decline o industrial employmentpartly counteracted by adecades-long build-up o debt and relocation to lower-wage peripherieshas made it ever more di cult or capitalism to absorb the consequenceso vast demographic trans ormations in di erent sectors o the world-system: ageing populations in the zone o a fuence, ever larger andyounger populations in the zones o immiseration, negating whatevertendencies might once have existed within capitalism to homogenizethe world o labour through classical processes o modernization.Anagnorisis is a term that reopens the problem o what the critique o ideology means within this latest era o global, alternately neoliberal orpostmodern capitalism. In a sense, the contemporary experience o theomnipresence o the market makes ideology critique superfuous, sincethere is no longer any alse consciousness, no longer any need to dis-guise the workings o the system and its various programmes in termso idealistic or altruistic rationalizations; so that the unmasking o thoserationalizations, the primordial gesture o debunking and o exposure,no longer seems necessary. 24 The dominant ideology o the times issimply a cynical reason embedded in the media-saturated li e routineso the current orm o capitalism, dulci ed by bouts o philanthropy orcertain designated categories o victims.

The complacency o this moral universe cannot be ru fed by exposso sweatshop exploitation, human-rights abuse, or the wretchedness o conditions at home or abroad. What is required in this context, Jamesonargues, is a demonstration o the historical transience o this mode o li e, taking the orm o an unbending logic o reversal that comes todisclose vast unincorporated multitudes whose very existence makespalpable the orce o some o its untranscendable structural limits.

Anagnorisis is the stripping away o layers o ideological concealmentand occultation, to o er a terri ying glimpse o the historically Real.25

In a brilliant, contemporary re-reading o Marxs Capital , Jameson claimsthat the ultimate point o this work was to demonstrate how a societyorganized around a process o value-creating labour eventually stag-gers into a condition o permanent mass un- and under-employment,spawning an ever deeper underworld o surplus humanity: not the

least astonishing and dialectical union o opposites discovered by Marx,and not the least terrible, is that indispensible unction o capitalism tocreate what is blandly known as the reserve army o the proletariat. 26

24 Valences, p. 413. 25 Valences, p. 568. 26 Valences, p. 576.


17/23

balakrishnan: Jameson 47O course capitalism has always depended upon there being a surpluspopulation, people in excess o the available amount o employment.As the Italian economist Ferdinando Galiani has it: God has decreedthat the men who carry on the most use ul cra ts should be born inabundant numbers.

While later Marxists would ignore this side o his work, Marx himsel placed the demographic preconditions o capitalism at the centre o his critique o political economy. In volume 1 o Capital , he argued thatthe process o the accumulation o surplus value undermined its ownconditions o expansion through its tendency to replace labour-powerwith capitalgenerating over the long term an irreversible decline inthe demand or labour. 27 Marx presented the outline o a trend un old-ing out rom a structuring contradiction in the value orm, mani estingitsel in an erratic interplay o tendencies and counter-tendencies: Sucha sel -destructive contradiction cannot be in any way even enunciatedor ormulated as a lawa proposition, Jameson asserts, which cutsto the very heart o all representation and all philosophical systems. 28 The unrepresentability o contemporary capitalism to which Jamesonhas o ten re erred does not, as is commonly thought, stem rom the

sheer scale and networked complexity o the world-system, nor rom therelocation o manu acturing away rom the li e world o consumption.It is this contradiction that is un-representable in the terms o ordinaryexperience: it does not seem to make sense that a society in which almosteveryone is compelled to make a living by creating value or the marketcontinually ends up with less available employment, stagnant wages andever deeper in debt, when everyone knows that this is the only rationalway that an economy can be organized.

This situation might allow us to revisit what Lukcs in History and ClassConsciousness meant by the vantage point o the proletariat. It is perhapsonly now, in the midst o the dissolution o all readily available orms o collective praxis, that we can con ront the stark dialectical problem thatthe contemporary long downturn o capitalism has created. The inabilityo this system to reemploy the work orces it is in the protracted process o shedding is also undercutting the power o these populations to respond

collectively to and there ore experience this sel -destructive contradiction27 On this point I am indebted to Aaron Benanavs interpretation o Marx on employ-ment: see Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History o Surplus Populations andSurplus Capital, Endnotes2, April 2010.28 Valences, p. 63; and Marx, Capital , vol. 1, p. 676.


18/23

48 nlr 66as a coherent historical process. The political subjectivization o this sel -destructive contradictionemployment under condition o surplus valuebecoming its opposite, an unemployable surplus humanity orms theLukcsian crux o the contemporary historical situation.

Jameson points out that it has long since been obvious that industrialworkers could no longer be the central subject o radical politics, as theirnumbers have shrunk steadily with the growing productivity o labour, ina process that ultimately converges with the long decline o the worldspeasantry. Readers o Marx will be amiliar with the idea that capitalismexpands by undercutting non-capitalist modes o subsistence, but it isperhaps only now becoming evident that it is dri ting towards a condi-tion o permanent mass unemployment, and in low-income countries,

uelling the explosive growth o slums, with little prospect o new phaseso accumulation and job creation. Even be ore the 1970s, when the orceo this trend began to reassert itsel against the e ects o Fordist massproduction and statist developmentalism that had long counteractedit, it was increasingly apparent that an older working class was beingpolitically eclipsed as the central subject o radical politics by new socialmovements and, in the Third World, by countryside-based guerrilla

struggles. Deleuzes and Guattaris notion o the hors-classedrew on con-temporary Italian theorizations o this earlier subjective eclipse as it usedexplosively with the 70s experience o a permanent structural marginali-zation o the working class. This term, as well as the later one multitude,articulates the antasy o an anarcho-communist revolutionary movementcompletely outside the State itsel , set loose by the ongoing dissolution o the world o labour.

This is the point at which we get the most vivid sense o the empiricalvalue o that Deleuzian terminology which might otherwise seem merelypoetic or speculative: decoding, deterritorialization, the replacement o the older codes by the new axiomatic that triggers and releases fuxionso all kinds.29

While sympathetic to such exuberant speculations, Jameson remainedsceptical o the Negrian and post-Fordist view that these changes weremani estations o a new, dynamic phase o capitalist accumulation pow-

ered by new orms o productive labour. In his own terms he arrived at anunderstanding o the intractable downturn o capitalism, engendering a



19/23

balakrishnan: Jameson 49fight orward into nancialization, that converges with the account o the period o ered by Robert Brenner:

It would be wrong to think o this universal stagnation (accompanied by

stupe ying quantities o loose and unproductive riches) as a cyclical mat-ter by virtue o which the political 1960s were succeeded by a new periodo unbridled speculation, itsel presumably to be replaced by this or thatreturn o government responsibility and state intervention. 30

Recalling or the moment the Aristotelian conception o peripeteia orreversal, o victory capsizing into de eat, we might refect on how the lastseveral decades o capitalism con orm to this pattern: dizzying paper-money speculation on the one hand, and new orms o immiserationon the other, in structural unemployment and in the consignment o vast tracts o the Third World to permanent unproductivity. 31 But thepoint now is how to think o this as leading to the second moment o anagnorisis, the estranging realization o what our ideologies had notallowed us to recognize until now, o the other as the same, and o our-selves becoming this other.

Aristotle in the slums

The structure o an ideology, according to Jameson, should be ana-lysed in terms o its possibilities o generating the act or operation o anagnorisis: the identi cation o agents not yet ully visible.32 A charac-teristically Jamesonian orm o ideology analysis is the semiotic square,whose heuristic signi cance many have questioned, but which isemployed to dramatic dialectical e ect in the last essay in Valences. Thestructural impasse o capitalism allows us to analyse our ideological map

o the di erent regions o the world-system over this period as a semioticsquare revealing a disconcerting pattern o identities taking shape acrossthe starkest oppositions o ate. For Jameson this allows us to ponderthe dialectical ambiguation o the space and time o the world-systemin the orm o a gure that superimposes the narrative o capitalismas the rise and all o employment onto the geographical spaces o theworld-system: America-Europe in the top le t corner (the employed);China in the top right (the employable reserve army o labour); A rica

in the bottom right (the unemployable), and a ourth position at bottomle t, indexing a temporal dimension within the matrix o opposed and

30 Valences, p. 401. 31 Valences, p. 375. 32 Valences, p. 579.


20/23

50 nlr 66contrasted geographical regions. The term that occupies this ourth posi-tion (the ormerly employed) reveals the common destiny o the system,as late capitalism passes over into a condition beyond the limit o whatis presently conceivable. The protracted structural crisis o capitalism,the growth o the slum city, o permanent obsolescence, o overpopula-tion in other words, is a change in the transcendental conditions o theappearance o the Other rom the category o quality to that o quantity,giving rise to the emergence o the demographic sublime as a gurationo extinction or utopia.

Be ore Jameson there have been ew Marxists who took seriously thehistorical signi cance o the act that a li e that began in 1945 wouldby its 90th year have witnessed a quadrupling o the worlds popula-tion. The headlong movement towards this absolute limit not just o capitalism, but o nature itsel as its ecological opposite, takes us backto the Rousseauian advent o civilization, becoming the condition o the appearance o historicity as such. For the inhabitants o the slumsare not merely the personnel o the periodic visits to the lower depthso the great modern cities and the glimpses o London poor or o themysteries o Paris; they open a transcendent window onto human his-

tory itsel , rom which nostalgic glimpses o tribal Utopias are scarcelyo much use as a relie or remedy.33 A passage rom Mike Daviss recentwork on the subject conveys a sense o the history that is disclosed bythis new and utter absence o security and shelter that no Agambenianphilology can adequately convey.

The cities o the uture, rather than being made out o glass and steel asenvisioned by earlier generations o urbanists, are instead largely con-structed out o crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks andscrap wood . . . Much o the 21st-century urban world squats in squalor,surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay. Indeed, the one billion citydwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy atthe ruins o the sturdy mud homes o atal Hyk in Anatolia, erected atthe very dawn o city li e 9,000 years ago.34

This brings us to the nal, third term o this Aristotle- ramed account o the ideology o narrative orm: pathos, the experience o tragedys bloody

concluding tableau. Jameson conceives o the mise-en-scneo History inemphatically Heideggerian language, as a heightening, or intensi cation

33 Valences, p. 569.34 Mike Davis, Planet o Slums, London and New York 2006, p. 19.


21/23

balakrishnan: Jameson 51in which endurance is pushed to its limits, when Being itsel somehowappears through and beyond individual beings and the present is expandedto include past and uture all at once. Fully aware o the quasi-theologicalbaggage that any invocation o the Absolute must carry, he suggests, inrefections on Malraux, that perhaps there are times when the terri yingReal o which it is a guration can only be made visible in this orm o portentous solemnities. 35 An Althusserian sense that all o our experienceis structured, indeed contaminated by ideology leads to the conclusionthat such gures might be use ul and indeed, on occasion, indispensible.But an earlier citation o Lukcs conveys an inevitable deduction rom thisunderstanding o the extravagances that arise when we con ront the limitso what can be thought and experienced: The absolute is nothing but the

xation o thought, it is the projection into myth o the intellectual ailureto understand reality concretely as a historical process. 36

The original Aristotelian concept o pathos represented the culminatingmoment o ate in the orm o a tableau, tted to the proportions o thecity-state world o ancient tragedy. Implicit in this understanding o pathos is a problematic ideology o a transparent visualization o the historical,and Jameson is quick to remind us that in the image-saturated universe

o the spectacle, there is no chance that the structuring contradictionor absent cause o our overall situation, grasped in terms o capitalism,civilization and nature itsel , could ever simply come into view. And yetthere is no purely non-representational orm o thinking that can eas-ily overcome this problem o the visual rei cation o experiencewhata contemporary translation o Hegel would call picture thinking. ForJameson this is not rst and oremost an epistemological or metaphysi-cal matter o the correspondence o thought and being, but a problem

o the contemporary limits o praxis. All o our notions o historicalchange are entangled in anachronistic pictures o collective agency roma bygone era o revolutionary politics, tted to the proportions o thenational and international spaces in which earlier stages o moderni-zation un olded. Such static spectacles o collective agency seem to be

oreclosed or the time being, and in the meantime a new attunement totime and history must be cultivated.

What is the role o Marxism in articulating the orms o this new exis-tential situation? Jameson argues that in the context o the remorseless

35 Valences, pp. 604, 506.36 Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 374, 187; quoted in Valences, p. 209.


22/23

52 nlr 66destruction o all partly insulated local and national worlds, and theiruni cation into the single temporality o the world-system, the once pro-

ound problem o the relativity o the experience o the historical is itsel relativized; as a result, it is necessary or other thought modes to ndtheir positions and develop their possibilities within Marxism as such.This was not yet the case with modernist passions and absolutes whichstill disposed o other lines o fight in a global situation which did notyet seem de nitely sealed and secured by the logic o capital. 37

Jameson subscribes to Sartres view that Marxism cannot be true i his-tory is decomposed into an irreducible plurality o autonomous modeso li e, but clari es the way in which the capitalist uni cation o historymakes these multiple pasts, on which there was no uni ying subjectiveperspective, also intelligible. This sheds new light on the meaning o theterm postmodernism and its relation to another term that has been atthe centre o Jamesons work since the 80s: globalization. For all themythologies that surrounded the latter, and the underlying problem o the stagnation o capitalism that the various processes it named couldnot surmount, postmodern globalization can now be seen as the longprocess o the decay o di erent national cultures, o alternate capitalist

and even anti-capitalist modernizations, ultimately o modern history asthe dynamic o combined and uneven development.

Sharpening the dialectical orm o the question that organizes the lastessay in Valences, we might ask: what are the potentially political ormsin which this post-historical situation might be experienced historically?Alternately we might re ormulate the problem in the literary terminol-ogy o this latest addition to The Poetics o Social Forms: what is the genre

in which the historical in this paradoxical post-historical sense can bemade to appear? Jameson simply rules out tragedy as too complicitousin the sombre ruling-class ideologies o the past, now available only inthe aestheticized orm o reactionary anachronism. But comedy too, theway in which we might imagine a providential emancipation rom an all-subsuming social orderalthough still an indispensible moment o anygalvanizing vision o political changemight today seem too improb-able as a generic articulation o the shape o what is coming.

It is in the context o the neutralization o both literary orms thatJameson o ers some concluding thoughts on the most long-standing



23/23

balakrishnan: Jameson 53topic o his entire oeuvre: utopia, the absolute negation o the becoming-absolute o capital, our alternate world, one which we apprehend only inoutline and in intimations o the beyond. Here, it is linked to the idea o a spatial dialectic; the last words o Valencesmaintain that Utopia existsand that other systems, other spaces, are still possible. 38 This capacious,Blochian notion o utopia has been criticized or its tendency towardover-extension, and its remoteness rom any practical, political calculus.Over the last several decades, as one orm a ter another o anti-systemic,and even classically re ormist, politics collapsed or retreated be ore theadvancing storm o late capitalist nancialization and the ideologicalatmosphere that surrounded it, this criticism arguably lost much o its

orce. By all accounts, we are now entering into a new phase o the pro-tracted long downturn o late capitalism, or decades counteracted andconcealed by an enormous build-up o unsustainable debt and specula-tion. Forecasts o the shape o the societies that might emerge out o themeltdown o neo-liberalism are obviously in an incipient state, limitedby still unanswerable questions regarding the various orms o collectiveresponse, the subjects o the coming political period. But in the absenceo any plausible scenario o system-wide economic renewal, it might soonno longer be true that the end o capitalism is less conceivable than the

literal end o the worldthe stark limit on thought and experience thatJameson once memorably identi ed as the transcendental statute o thepostmodern condition. As more determinate orms o negation struggleto assert themselveswith whatever ultimate prospects o successtheneed or a new term o totalization may soon become evident.

38 Valences, p. 612; or the spatial dialectic, see especially pp. 6870.

New Left Review Balakrishnan on Jameson Valences of Dialectic

Documents

Transcript of New Left Review Balakrishnan on Jameson Valences of Dialectic