The anagogic impulse in Jameson

Okay, I’m getting really burnt out here, so I’m going to give this one last cursory shot for the night. In the first chapter of tpu, Jameson engages with the “scholastic” exercise of Althusser’s antiinterpretive current in Marxism. (I’ve made note of his footnote on page 23 about skipping over this particular bit of the book on my “Jameson Form” note page and want to go deeper into his form in theory later.) I’ve got to admit that Althusser is still a really huge challenge for me, even on the level of reader-comprehension; but generally, Jameson’s interpretation of Althusser’s Darstellung or expressive causality (also historicism) is relatable to periodization in that it inevitably privileges one component of that particular epoch as a master-code in interpreting that given period. (Here, self-referentiality is blatant): Althusser’s mode of expressive causality is also envisioned as a type of allegorical code for the individual subject” insofar as he or she can imagine herself in direct/lived relation to otherwise transpersonal realties and the social collective logic of history” (30). Jameson then goes on to discuss the four levels of allegorical access to reality through a biblical type of formation of the four levels of allegorical placement, the fourth level ending in the anagogical.

Here, I’m going to switch from within the very specific situation of this analysis within the text and move to Jameson’s conclusion, which begins, with much ado (please see my last entry, if confused) about the need for the displaced individual subject and a remastering of even individual subject-oriented overdetermination (always within and causally absent somewhere within the structure) into a genuine subject-of-History-as-collectivity. In this sense, the displaced individual whose Althusserian (and ostensibly Derridian) variants are lost in a network of structural and therefore post-structural nonsenses, the only way “out” of this particular structural causality is through a collective identity. The term anagogical is very clearly oriented towards a type of pre-cursor to the dialectic of ideology and Utopia, because within the anagogic mode of interpretation (in an Althusserian sense) there is arrested the unmanageable Utopian impulses of a historicist/individual-based approach to Utopia. The discussion of the individual, in very crass terms, that I’ve been so worked up over, must essentially be re-considered and re-worked, even on the conceptual level of the Intellectual, which is not a disparate set of minds but a collective historical body [I have to back away even from this kind of mental leap, however, without a lot of serious contemplation]. But the anagogic mode of interpretation in a Jamesonian sense is also the pivotal moment in considering the dialectic of ideology and Utopia.

The veritable “after life” of the imagined relationship to the concrete is wholly ideological in its formal grasp (the advertisement sign that arrests the water-cooler worker into another set of false events) and the mis-managed Utopian impulse that it awakens and profits from. But, at the heart of this anagogic relationship is the essential crux of the mis-management, which can’t be “resolved” (rather, I’m not engaging in that sort of discussion here) but where the essential truth of Marxist historical materialism is present, that is, the Utopian impulse itself is the dialectical counter to ideology. Namely that, although the ideological can misappropriate desire (understood as the Utopian impulse) is invalid as a content-worthy amelioration to that original impulse and this is verifiable in the very re-creation of the event, the return to cultural management. So, while the allegorical relationship to the real does in fact appropriate reality, its very success (has ensured consumption, for example, which fails the consumer, and in-turn ensures further consumption) is in fact exposing its own weakness against the Utopian impulse that refuses reification on a social level, even if the individual is inextricably lost in a mine-sweep of causal relations.

Demystifying the would-be master narrative; on writing

On the other hand, the issue of the academic disciplines serves to dramatize the ambiguity of the Althusserian position. For in its insistence on the semi-autonomy of the levels or instances–and in particular in its notorious and self-serving attempt to reinvent a privileged place for philosophy proper, in a tradition in which the latter was supposed to have been overcome and subsumed by the “unity of theory and practice”–the Althusserian conception of structure has often seemed to its adversaries to constitute a renewed defense of the reified specialization of the bourgeois academic disciplines, and thereby an essentially antipolitical alibi. It is true that a somewhat different Althusser has himself…taught us that in this society what look like ideas require vigilant demystification as the messages of so many institutional or bureaucratic infrastructures (for example, the University). But his critics turn this view against him by reading his own system of semi-autonomous levels as a legitimation of the FCP, henceforth one more inert institution among others within the bouregois state. It would be frivolous to try to choose between these antithetical evaluations of the Althusserian operation…rather, they mark out a space in which that operation is objectively and functionally ambiguous. (TPU, Jameson 38).

Whew, well that took a while to type: coffee can of pennies held the book open. This paragraph, like many of Jameson’s paragraphs, says as much within his method of writing as the meaning of the words. It’s funny that I’m about to strip away so many of the layered stylistic and synchronic bits in this paragraph for the very purpose of exploring the ills of reduction. Consider this not to be a reduction but… a temporary suspension.

Althusserian structuralism is so properly dialectical that it was mistaken for something else all together: reification. It’s clear enough for the reader to look through the imaginary lens of history and imagine that Jameson is quite right. The adversaries were reductionists and there was very little to be said about it at the end of the day (at the end of the twentieth century…) people were mad that means were still twisting out the same contorted, rotting, stumped ends.

But maybe, all this nonsense with the ends is really what Jameson, Althusser, the Marxian dialectic, demand that we abandon. Perhaps any type of life philosophy, or “unity of practice and philosophy” in a truly a. historical and b.material master-register *don’t* line up with this or that political movement.

Scandalous as it is, maybe there’s something more than politics.

It all started at 2pm in Seoul 362 days ago

I think you should all know something about me. I have a pre-myself and a post-myself period. Both epochs are slightly useful but equally flawed: pre-myself was all perception, all observation, the world was a loose connectivity of phenomena that circled around me, unknowable. Post-myself acquired the language to experience what I had felt for a very long time, the means to survey the proximity to the Idea of the Thing without ever touching it. [The outside of the persona and the impossible imagined void of being the persona, the belief from the void of belief.] But of course, I was always myself in these instances; while I may change, the enormity of consumption, of poverty, of false-realities still rattle me to no end. Only now, I’m not perplexed and sad that I can’t rewrite my world into a certain-type-of-film (which I assumed everyone else could do or had no need of doing because they were already secure in their own film-reality); I’m perplexed because I could never enter that world, even before I was myself, and I don’t know how to help others out. My pre/post demonstration does have a point, I promise.

I love taking little trips down the short pike, finding its breaks, finding its intersections, its segues, departures. But there are six hours that can’t be accounted for. [Of course, I could die immediately after posting this and then there'd be the 3-day chunk but I consider that more accounted for than not.] But there’s a rift in the road, something I can’t cross over or get back. There’s tear in the universe and I’m convinced that that’s where my *conversion* is; and I’m more convinced every day that that’s where I am, too.

I wrote ^ and walked away from my computer for a while… I forgot that I had to say goodbye to 2009 and I’m not too thrilled right now, either. Sometimes I get caught up in the moment that I slip out of justly and minutely accounted time. This was the year that I will always remember. This was the year that I began to want to live; I began living (in the very dusty, small capacity that I can).

No, I’ve been wandering around the planet this year six hours out of joint. At least, that’s how I thought it started. Like any of my stories (fiction and non) I’ll begin before the beginning, to get into the mood of things. Two days before my Rutgers-funded trip to Cambodia began, my friend and I looked at our itinerary and found a twelve-hour gap in Korea–twelve hours on New Year’s Day in Korea and no one had figured this out before us. Cut to: Seoul-6am New Year’s morning. Last I recalled in New York, it was somewhere around 11:45pm. We landed, the mountains were purple and pink in 2009′s dewy, 12-degree mist. The bus from Incheon was round, clean, incubatory. But where had my new year gone? It was already there, but it slipped away from me–there was a TV on the bus but it was all in Korean. The letters were round and incubatory, too. There was a long line of condos-it stretched from the airport to the city, most of the windows facing each other. But I could still see the sky and the mountains and the pink orb to the east, gently rising on a day that hadn’t happened.

We had breakfast at a  nice hotel, bread and jam and coffee. We took the subway. But I don’t remember the subway, really. I only remember walking up the stairs into the sunlight, it could have been any city; it was Seoul, South Korea. It was 2pm, it was midnight, it was 2009. That was it. Somewhere my life was compressed and mushed back together again up the stairs. I’ve been trying to find the caution sign in all the photos, I can’t see anything pointing to a rift in the universe. I think I was the only one.

The flight to Cambodia was non-existent. We got off the plane into a building that mocked the worst kind of Disney Cambodia airport. I don’t really want to talk about Cambodia. It was good and bad and I was more bad than good, not because I *did* anything to help or not in the token sense, not because I got drunk and pretended to be an Australian because I was too embarrassed to be an American. (This is stupid, of course, because either way I was totally invading… “helping their economy.” Developing it.)

No, because I realized my world-situation and I realized that no mural-painting in an orphanage in Phnom Phen can change the implicit acceptance, the implicit violence with which I painted it. No four-hour tour in a land-mine museum exempts me from the rich history of ignorance, of cultural relativist bullshit I played in to for nineteen years. No amount of delicately taking pictures of trash pickers in the garbage dump will make me “one of them.” The accepted NGO worker, the joke-feministing activist, the John Smith of the Third New World. I had a situation and it didn’t come printed a manufactured laptop case — express yourself! My worlds could not be separated, from that day onward. The walls and roofs were for the tourists, the tents, the rotting river boats were for the natives.

I get back from Cambodia–I sleep for a few days. I think I was detoxing from all the alcohol. And I started writing my story. The same story I work on today, and probably for the next few years. It had nothing to do with Cambodia (in a negative way, I think it has everything to do with it). But in a more general sense, it was about people entrenched in positions, in non-positions, and knowing nothing about it. To be perfectly frank, it’s about being dumped out into the world as a product, and a failing one at that.

Spring semester- Althusser’s spring. Lenin and ideology sealed the deal, I was in for the long haul. The snow was falling heavily and I sat on a bench in Brower Common for a few hours, leaping back to the opening pages every now and then. It was the first time I had really worked towards something, felt something. But summer was the worst.

I lived in the back of Cook campus. I got it. I read “The Coming Insurrection;” I was alone for the most part. I was almost fired for reading War and Peace. It always rained. I was out of joint with my friends, my boyfriend, my bed, the food I ate, my body. I started reading Lukacs, abandoned him for Althusser again. Abandoned him for youtube videos on social alienation. I could have watched myself. I freaked out and I stopped writing, I stopped reading. I recoiled and felt the warm last efforts of August. Something Big was coming.

Fall semester began. It was the greatest semester I’ve had, yet. It’s all too fresh to condense (I’m sure it’s all there in my ramblings). When I say it was great, I don’t mean emotionally. Emotionally it’s shit to be isolated, to make do with the attenuated thread of communication you have with the outside world. But it all got me to thinking, it got me to writing. I’m doing more now that I’ve ever done. Just ask Me-Ti.

When I isolate the days, one from the next and last, I can never string them right along each other again without losing the capacity of time–I mean, with every pause, there’s something lost. And those six hours, I think it might really be a lifetime.

New Posts To Come!

My treatment of “The Russia File” using Althusser’s State Apparatuses essay… hopefully by tomorrow; will be followed by the treatment of the same article using instead Simulacra and Simulations.

Working through “Ideology and Ideological State Appartuses”

Ideology is a “Representation” of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence

“World outlooks” are a form of ideology to Althusser. They are ideological in the sense that they provide separate modes of understanding (in truth) a larger relation of existence. These processes (political ideology, ethical ideology, religious ideology, etc) are also the fundamental platforms to see a dialectical divergence (ineptitude) of these different ideologies, provided “that we do not live one of these ideologies as the truth.”

But, these ideological structure, according to Althusser, do allude to reality in some way. And they must be interpreted. There are three different types of interpretation:

1.Mechanistic: God is the imaginary representation of the real KING.

2. Hermeneutic: God is the essence of real man.

3. L.A.’s interpretation and thesis: ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.

…[A]ll ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them.

(Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses; Literary Theory, an Anthology. Pg 695.)

Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence.

[In this section, I did not like that L.A. asks the reader to be disposed to the point that ideas have a material existence, which seems to me to be an extremely important divergence... but it is something that is merely asked to be respected as a truth. I wonder if there is any other place in his writings that I might look for the argument behind this statement?]

Ideology is always material because “[it] exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material.”

The Individual in Ideology

The belief derives (for everyone, i.e. for all those who live in an ideological representations of ideology, which reduces ideology to ideas endowed by definition with a spiritual existence) from the ideas of the individual concerned, i.e. from him as a subject with a consciousness which constrains the ideas of his belief. In this way, i.e., by means of the absolutely ideological “conceptual” device thus set up (a subject endowed with a consciousness in which he freely forms or freely recognizes ideas in which he believes), the (material) attitude of the subject concerned naturally follows.

(IISA, pg 696.)

Man’s relation to the modes of production are not real. But those modes of production are real; man therefore ascribes to one (or several) ideologies to make sense of this otherwise inept or abusive structure and acts through it in his concrete existence. Therefore, ideology has a material existence and history, (because history and its events are the result of ideological processes).

That’s all for now; will complete responses later.

Friday night

Due to an expected turn of events, I am re-reading Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. I am almost finished with the article, but I felt my eyes glaze over a moment ago, and realized that it would be best to stop for the evening. (I just reinterpolated myself. Kidding.)

I also read Balibar’s essay Althusser and the Rue d’Ulm which was adapted from his obituary.

I need some tea and some physical movement beyond the tapping of the keys beneath my fingers.

Signing off.

b

And here I am, shortly after

I was just about to jump into The Adventure of French Philosophy when I realized I should probably take some time to follow-up on a previous entry (“America, that ‘syllogism whose middle term- the Isthmus of Panama- is very narrow’!”).

After a meeting with one of my professors, I think I am better able to organize the research necessary to answer those very crude points of interest.

(I would like to note that I am officially in over my head. Continuing on–)

This post will be focused on:

Overdetermination.

In Althusserian terms (from the glossary in the 2005 Verso edition of For Marx):

Freud used [overdetermination] to describe (among other things) the reprsentation of the dream-thoughts in images priveleged by their condensation of a number of thoughts in a single image (condensation/Verdictung), or by the transference of psychic energy from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial images (displacement/verschibung-Verstellung). Althusser uses the same term to describe the effects of the contradictions in each practice (q.v.) constituting the social formation on the social formation as a whole, and hence back on each practice and each contradiction, defining the pattern of dominance and subordination, antagonism and non-antagonism of the contradictions   structure in dominance at any given historical moment. More precisely, the overdetermination of a contradiction is the reflection in it of its conditions of existence within the complex whole, in other words its uneven development.

After that nice and neat definition, I would like to highlight a moment near the end of “On the Materialist Dialectic” where the terms antagonism and non-antagonism are joined with a third, the explosion:

I shall characterize the first (non-antagonism) as the moment when the overdetermination of a contradiction exists in the dominant form of displacement (the ‘metonymic’ form of what has been enshrined in the phrase: ‘quantitative changes’ in history and theory); the second, as the moment when overdetermination exists in the dominant form of condensation (acute class conflict in the case of society, theoretical crisis in a science, etc.); and the last, the revolutionary explosion (in society, in theory, etc.), as the moment of unstable global condensation inducing the dissolution and resolution of the whole, that is, a global restructuring of the whole on a qualitatively new basis.

(216.)

Not to provide any answers or insight tonight. I certainly was not going to let a fascination slip away from me. Back with more in the future.

Signing off.

b

I am going to do a bad (but maybe a good) thing

And go out of order. For once, I will admit it (since I never go in order, anyway).

For Marx posed so many questions; it made me pose many, many more of them… and most shall have to remain unanswered (for the time being, or forever. I don’t know).

I suppose I could begin with the part I liked the best; “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht.” Why did I like it? Probably because it is the most obvious instance of theory coming into contact with art, with writing… and I suppose (even play writing) shares a closeness with literature. And so, I liked it.

I’m fairly certain that the word aesthetic appeared either very few times or not at all. But I think that this essay had a strong current of aesthetics running through it (this might just be an exaggerated link because Brecht’s name always reminds me of the ironically revolting looking pink and black book in which he discusses this subject at length).

Yes. I am leafing over the pages again and I really do like it.

But… that means very little.

I think that before I go into my level of understanding of Althusser’s analysis of the play and its implications, I should take a second to talk about my surprise at authorship. On page 141, he says:

At this point, someone will want to stop me, arguing that what I am drawing from the play goes beyond the intentions of the author–and that I am, in fact, attributing to Bertolazzi what really belongs to Strehler. But I regard this statement as meaningless, for at issue here is the play’s latent structure and nothing else. Bertolazzi’s explicit intentions are unimportant: what counts, beyond the words, characters and the action of the play, is the internal relation of the basic elements of its structure.

When I read this for the first time, I was a little put off. I thought to myself, well, shouldn’t the reader attribute the maximum credit to the author for those praised ‘internal basic elements’? It had me thinking all the way on the bus ride to College Avenue. It made me think of a conversation I had with a coworker who said (after expressing his dismay at a statue in front of the Museum of Natural History for being so “racist,” to which I replied, “well, but wouldn’t you recognize if the stances in it were different, wouldn’t it feel even more disingenuous?”) that he would not give that much credit to the sculptors.

And I find that to be dangerous because it limits the serious discussion a person can have; it leaves too much room to the viewer (or reader, in the case of literature).

And, as always, my own question and frustrations led me to a deeper appreciation for what Althusser was talking about: it was not my coworker’s place to give “credit” to the sculptor, it was not Althusser’s place (or concern) to give credit to Bertolazzi. It was not a matter of subjectivity. It was a matter of tracing the existence of universal structures in a given piece, and since the viewer was in fact “the viewer” and not the reader, it would be impossible to attribute the internal structures of the work to the writing itself.

This brings me very much off topic. But I want to go this way. In literature, the structures that Althusser is referring to in the staging of the “Piccolo Teatro” are the structures that I, as a reader, am able to see in physical terms on the page. I’m not sure if this is entirely accurate to say, since Althusser does mention that the words are not what is important in the play… but the structure of the stage and the structure of the words on the page do seems (at least in my opinion) to have some connection in their ability to construct a conveyance beyond their ideological framework.

And when L.A. says “[i]t does not matter whether Bertolazzi consciously wished for this structure, or unconsciously produced it: it constitutes the essence of his work; it alone makes both Strehler’s interpretation and the audience’s reaction comprehensible,” (141). This is the annunciation I had tried to make at work with my coworker… it is not about intent. It is all about content, since practically everything that occurs within ideology is unknown as an ideology (in the sense that I am calling it an ‘intent’ or a conscious effort) to those people who draw it out.

…After a moment or two at the teapot, I realize that I am really making two points. I hope that they are not contradictory ones.

I perceive the written work (or in the case of “Piccolo Teatro,” the staged work) as having a dialectical quality. The ‘content’ insofar as it’s usage or language within the framework it was written becomes inconsequential, since those relationships are always self-fulfilling. But the real content of the work (the content that springs out of the framework in spite of itself) must be viewed regardless of the author’s conscious or unconscious effort: therefore, it is not a matter of subjectivity, but it is essential to  appreciate the submissions and the intended/unintended content of the author.

So… how do I know when to attribute this intention? Do I ever acknowledge it? Or, does it depend entirely on the genre? (For it is too difficult to determine the physical ‘strcture’ of Bertolazzi’s writing since it is delivered auditorally and meant for the stage. Therefore, the view must attribute the punctuated symbolism of Bertolazzi’s writing to Strehler since he controlled the physical structure of the play.)

Am I stuck?

America, that ‘syllogism whose middle term- the Isthmus of Panama- is very narrow’!

I would like to dedicate a few postings to L.A.’s  essay On the Materialist Dialectic:

This entry, in particular will serve to outline those future postings.

1. I would like to flesh out L.A.’s concept of overdetermination. I think it is an essential hinge to understanding Structuralism, specifically, and adding a new dimension of “reading” Marx, in general.

2. Generalities I, II, and III. During my first read, it was difficult for me not to view these processes in a linear order (but I’m thinking that it may be more beneficial to find a more spatially-compatible image with the concept of overdetermination.

3. (This might be a hinge point on my second interest) but I would very much like to discuss Hegel’s inversion versus Marx’s movement (or work) from Generalities I to III. (I think this is where I am confusing my spatial metaphors, since Hegel appears to move in a very linear pattern.)

Off to a meeting in Princeton. Hopefully the train ride will afford me more time to organize for these trying times.

Signing off.

b