the fervent communist: dialectical revelations in jameson’s tpu

Posted by Whatever Color Flag on June 13, 2010

I’ve got to organize a properly precis-like piece of work on Jameson’s the Political Unconscious but I thought that it was a noteworthy experience enough to warrant a note up here. Over a year ago, I engaged in the process of learning about Marxism and beyond that, in the fall of 2009, I began a particular type of project called “the missing place of ethics in Marxism.” The materials that I was vastly exposed to were (in all of my theoretical readings, for the large part) part of what Jameson reservedly calls the negative hermeneutic. This may very well be due to a misreading, or more primitive kind of rereading that my overdetermined cultural status/confrontations would not allow me to escape. And obviously enough, when I read works like ‘The Coming Insurrection,’ there were the real “positive” if only they were quantifiable verbalizations of an otherwise negative, vacant, not-yet-demystified discourse, sliding painfully between an internal dialog and an irreconcilable beyond-ness of the individual subject in August 2009. But these kinds of readings ultimately fell short in terms of a legitimate mode of contemplating Marxism on all of its valences: that is, hermeneutically in both a negative or positive sense (as qualified terms in Jameson’s Conclusion)–it is yet to be seen if perhaps these valences are useful along the other axes of politics and philosophy, which I won’t even begin to contemplate here.

The conclusion writes at length about the necessity of a de-centered subject from one’s own individuality, which was very useful, mostly for its simple but absolutey necesary engagement with the simplest terms of self and collectivity; this modest self-revelation ultimately re-affirms my initial suspicions that were followed more concretely in the fall of 2009. I was concerned then, as I am now, with the status of a certain type of “ethics” in Marxism, which in more sophisticated terms, I can say is really this:

What are the standards of Utopian survival in times of ideological repression? And, in times of defunct/changing (once) structural oppositions to capitalism, how does the “individual” subject reconcile an otherwise already-defeated and alienated intellect emerge from increasingly bordered ideological narratives in order to reconsider the Marxist project of Utopia?

One barely has to qualify the immense and intense variations of ideological repression that have flowered vigorously into a death-touch of the Left and also into a systematized standard of ‘connected experience’ that seem to crush the Utopian spirit over the course of the preceding decade. At once, mass culture propagates that we are at one with each other through the network of online connectivity but we are also hopelessly made more disparate, each living in multifariously fractured realities as the basis/objective “need” for such a network of moderated interaction. A similar kind of dialectical situation is the standard of unified experience as a de-centered self as it exists in the block-buster film: while engaging in the form of ideological repression in the movie theater, watching something like the generic romance of “New in Town,” the content of the film (while not “redeemable” in any sense) is based on the Utopian impulse of collective organization of marginalized labor forces against the late capital enterprise of piecemeal production.

The heart of the matter emerges as the need to identify already re-appropriated Utopian urges in the ideological realm and pull them from their managed shells in order to reinvision the collectivity.

Now, doesn’t that sound so nice? And simple? And… all together political?

What would otherwise be a poltical or collective mobilization (something like the public strike or protest rally) has truly changed its locus into something more ideologically “managed” i.e. reified forms of social interaction.

… time to go. more later.

PS: Best friend and Communist cell-mate has informed me, the writer, that a practice analogy for the GRE is– “Jingoism is to Nationalism as Communism is to Fervor.”

Understanding Jameson’s Preface to “Marxism and Form”

Posted by Whatever Color Flag on March 24, 2010

The preface begins with a note on the status of the changing historical importance/perspective of history. This note is not the simple kind of “well, not then, but now” approach to writing or thinking about Marxism. In fact, it doesn’t even degrade the European Marxist milieu of the 30s. What it does do is lay out the relationship between history and the context of history, and those two things with this current moment…

But that’s not really all there is to it, either, because if all Jameson really meant to do was “bring it up to speed” with his moment, he would essentially degrade his own moment; he would essentially also degrade (in his words, relegate) history to the barracks of the night-school. (But with the uncertain status of grad-school education, this should be understood as a memory of factoids.) This factoid-like conceptualization is also something that we come in contact with frequently in today’s (anti) liberal arts rhetoric “what does this [english department] mean?” is the essentially vacant (not-wanting-to-be-answered) question in non-Marxist learning traditions…

What Jameson prefaces this book with is an example of the late/post 60s mis-remembrance of history (especially Marxist history) as a linear graph into the “present.” Jameson shows that the present, without some sort of ontological (i.e. form) the whole praxis of Marxism will fall flat in the next moment of the present, like chivalry or faith have through the eyes of 20th century capital. What this starts is something that Jameson argues all along: that Marxism is not one deciphering code among many inter-changeable and comparable with all of the others, but that Marxism can only be viewed as such from within capital’s already-formulated idea that appears to be invisible in factoid-history.

This form is the historical dialectic; the mode of social discernment through the rigorous use of a Marxist approach to history that stops and rests nowhere, not even in the “present.”

And so, Jameson’s book title really denotes that Marxism can only be used as a mode of social and historical understanding without falling into a linear time-trap like the bourgeois mode of analysis, through its form, which is the process of dialectical re-appraisal that never ceases. Jameson proceeds to put this concept into effect with a “relatively modest and straightforward” task of accounting for six of the 20th century’s greatest thinker for their contributions to literary criticism.

Each one of the chapters (so far; I haven’t finished the chapter on Sartre) is more than a Jamesonian re conception of the original thinker’s work, but a historical unfolding and explanation of their work that even their works did not realize fully because they were in some ways blinded by the moment in which they were written. Jameson seems committed to the notion to write historically and not according to ‘his own’ standards for another reason: it seems that so far in the book he has conceded and included the necessity for an eventual re-reading and historical adjustment to his own writing. [At this point, I don't want to do much more than pose this to myself.]

Jameson is also clear to note in the preface that this is not an exercise in philosophy, but a preparation for literary criticism. This is a tricky kind of claim, for if we follow it through his already stated necessity towards the idea of contemplating literature as well as previous Marxist theorists in a properly dialectic way, that demands the intensive task of philosophically rigorous writing.

In order to reach literary criticism, one must first reach through the past, reach through the theorist’s contemporary ideological blockages (not to mention the original author’s, either) and confront the text without snapping one’s hand through the sharded glass window of “present” ideology. That is to say, the project of Jameson’s book may well be understood as a work against the factoid/linear conception of philosophy and writing and time and criticism (i.e. everything) in an attempt to access truth (i.e. to fulfill the otherwise rhetorical void of meaning) which can

a. only occur in the Marxist Historical context that

b. is not a specific application (or a transitory ‘best-of’ application like in bourgeois analysis) but that elevates the otherwise factoid-like content of history into a Marxist [dare I say Utopian?] possibility.

Marxism and Form: T.W. Adorno

Posted by Whatever Color Flag on March 18, 2010

Reading this was not difficult in the sense of “understanding” the content; in many ways, I think that my independent study last semester had already digested the core message of the essay. But of course there is no core of dialectical writing; especially not with Jameson–especially not with Jameson contemplating the method and form of T.W. Adorno.

What was amazing to me was the textured folds of the text: it was never just Adorno, it was never just Jameson: remastering through the essay. At the end of the essay, there is a long and tremendous swelling up around Adorno’s dialectical writing style as a means to embed the content into poetic (J’s terminology) and negative form. But Jameson, unlike Adorno who employs the shifting fragment/equal footnote formation, formulates his writings in a dramatically different way. It holds with both authors that dialectical writing should be reflected at the level of the sentence. There is still a very large presence of the fragmentation: and this leads me to one of the brilliant passages that refer to both the form and content of the essay.

Jameson’s note on the footnote–

The footnote as such, therefore, designates a moment in which systematic philosophizing and the empirical study of concrete phenomena are both false in themselves; in which living thought, squeezed out from between them, pursues its fitful existence in the small print at the bottom of the page.

This was the footnote that connected all of Adorno’s other footnotes; that makes sense of dialectical writing and Jameson’s approach in Marxism and Form. At each moment in Jameson’s essay, I wanted to refer constantly back to Adorno’s text, but then I saw that I didn’t have to do that at all because they are so integrated into J’s writing that they are presented and interwoven with each other. Not as if they had been steam-pressed and pancaked together, but as if they have been unfolded like delicately flitting petals of neighboring universes, set up on display and only viewable one paper star-petal at a time. Every sentence considered as a galaxy, taken in en masse with nothing short of the overwhelming dream clusters through thousands upon thousands of years in time. Adorno’s method of writing is more than remembered in Jameson’s essay; I have made the provisional note that perhaps Jameson provides a positive recasting (a dialectical digestion) of Adorno’s writings in such a way that actually carry the writing further into the dialectic of history because it moves from one epoch to the other and therefore minimizes the unconscious and undialectical moments in isolated history.

The title of this section, “Historical Tropes” is brilliant:

So it is now that we hear not the notes themselves, but only their atmosphere, which becomes itself symbollic for us: the soothing or piquant character of the music, its blueness or sweetness, is felt as a signal for the release of appropriate conventionalized reactions. (23)

The trope in the standard (in the modern) sense is at the heart of the banal trope–what is this blueness? What is that digital and super-imposed aura that we paste onto music is very much like the “ready-made” idea that linear writings only usher-in. Only that the trope (if I could mash the musical example into an example for writing, itself) in music is something that signals a trope in culture regardless of the work. That is to say, what we search for in music, in reading, is a single and uniformed “point.” In writing, we are most fully aware of the point in the form of a thesis statement: in music there does not exist such a statement; in order to combat the inherently dialectic nature of the song there is a ready-made mood that we can experience in spite of the real of the notes.

It’s hard not to have these kinds of generalizations, even in this essay. What Jameson really acheives in this portion is an apreciation for the notes against the crushing immediacy to convey only the surface of things; only the surface of Adorno and of writing, of listening, of reading of existence.

As I wrote the above paragraph, my best friend grumbled in a simmering rage that her friend had joined a facebook group that said “support the cutting of core liberal arts at UNLV: would you like a doctor/nurse to stick that needle in your arm, or be able to quote dead poets?” It seems that the dialectic of the trope is more present than ever (haha, of course that’s not really true or even viable). Existence is quickly whithered into the kinds of totalitarianism that has already-installed the ready made idea into the fabric of social necessity, to the point that we no longer even need to read the book or listen to the song to feel what we have created to be blue, to be sweet. If I can’t hear the notes, why bother sticking my arm if it’s not to euthanize me?

For Post-Socratics

Posted by Whatever Color Flag on September 21, 2009

Minima Moralia’s no. 44:

Nothing is more unfitting for an intellectual resolved on practicing what was earlier called philosophy, than to wish, in discussion, and one might almost say in argumentation, to be right. The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of that spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down.

The simplest explication for this is that being “right” is fundamentally un-dialectical. And since the task is always to explore what was formerly known as philosophy as far and wide as possible within the dialectical approach, being right is… totally wrong. Not only does wanting an absolutist form of *anything* to be accessable, one is enevitably always isolating and distilling the real problematic out of the equation, until the final result is something not too far off from a philosophy.

And what is the problem with that? In terms of philosophy, there is something always fundamentally exlusionary if it approaches all intellectual problems from so-and-so perspective; from one end to the other, something rarely able to move back on itself without proving some other distillation.

To say this is not, however, to advocate irrationalism, the postulation of arbitrary theses justified by an intuitive faith in revelation, but the abolition of the distinction between thesis and arguement. Dialectical thinking, from this point of view, means that an argument should take on the pungency of a thesis and a thesis contain in itself the fullness of its reasoning.

In a philosophical text all the propositions should be equally close to the center.

(And finally;)

One of the tasks of dialectical logic is to erase the last traces of a deductive system, together with the last advocatory gestures of thought.

What are these advocatory gestures of thought?

Notes on Minima Moralia’s Dedication:

Posted by Whatever Color Flag on September 15, 2009

What does it mean to pass from philosophy to method?

“To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewelry, and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they still had the capacity to act as subjects, and as if something depended on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the facts that there is life no longer.”

- When did we become component parts of machinery?

- When did we have the capacity to act as subjects (even if it is was, “old” subjects)?

- Since the date of this publication, has there been any evidence or theoretical argument for the “new” subject?

- What dehabilitates us from acting as subjects?

- What is this ideology that conceals from us our own misappropriated identity? How has the “new” subject false-identity managed to lag so far behind this ideology… or is it better said that the ideology is intended to supersede the idea of subject?

How can Adorno, or any other, manage to make something depend on his actions? (Is it at all possible, anymore?)

“A dim awareness that means and end are inverted have not been eradicated from life.”

“The sphere of consumption as the mere caricature of real life..”

-What is real life?

“Only by virtue of opposition to production, as still not wholly encompassed by this oder, can men bring our another more worthy of human beings.

-What is the virtue of opposition? (Is this the same as the opposition to mechanical production via ‘authentic’ production?)

-What new order will this bring out: new order of life, of production, of man? All?

“What subsists life is the opposition.”

“yet the subject’s considerations are false from the point of view of life as appearance…”

-Isn’t this a closed-circuit discussion? All considerations start from the subject? (I want to avoid being humanist at all costs, or do I? I certainly want to avoid the closed-circuit of existentialism, while understanding this paradox…)

“For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself.” (15-16)

-What is the dissolution of the subject?

-What is this “new” subject going to arrive? (Or is there only a death?)

-Individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject; why? (Is “real” individual experience impossible or fatal in this subject-less self?)

What is being-for-itself subjectivity?

Is there a difference between the subject and the individual?

(I am trying to understand what Adorno really thinks about Hegel’s not upholding his own standards in understanding the individual as the fundamental category. “For this reason, social analysis can learn incomparably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded, while conversely the large historical categories, after all that has meanwhile been perpetrated with their help, are no longer above suspicion of fraud.”

-Can the question of Hegel’s patriarchal dismissal of the individual really be corrected or completed in such simple terms as “the subject is the ultimate reflection of society?” or vice versa? Wouldn’t that denote a type of furthered inversion, and not a dialectic relationship, at all?)

“In the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant category.”

-When was this period of decay? (Are we still in it? Is it the process of capitalism, in general?)

-”continued”- he does not anymore?

-what is positivity?

They are all intended to mark out points of attack or to furnish models for a future exertion of thought.

-Does it matter what this exertion was, is, or will be?

Necessitates that the parts of Minima Moralia do not altogether satisfy the demands of philosophy; and yet they are present, and survive. What does this mean for the ideal of “philosophy?” How does “ethics” fit, or not fit, as a fundamental, silent category into Marxism?