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.

the fervent communist: dialectical revelations in jameson’s tpu

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.”

It’s what I can’t talk about

Seven people in a mini-van, driving in and around the bowels of the Greater New York Area. “That looks nice, in a weird way,” he said, pointing to the petrochemical refineries awash in glowing orange light bulbs.

Before, at the house, the drummer goes into the attic while I’m still getting ready. It’s always too loud. These guys are some of my best friends. He comes down, ten books in hand– “Lennin and Philosophy, The German Ideology, The Lenin Reader, The Communist Manifesto, Spectres of Marx,” he says. He had been sent on a task.

They all take a book “one, two, three, go,” says the guitarist. They read in stereo, each his own chapter of a book that none of them cared to understand. They hate to seem contrived.

I laugh. You’ve got to laugh. But you also just get a little sad. My best friends.

We get the bassist. The fucking gps isn’t working. I’m trying to read in the back, the bassist wants a “straight answer” about political theory, about radical politics, about what I’m studying, and what it is.

I don’t say much. I can’t talk about it, not because I don’t care… I mean, I can’t say anything because I don’t know. I say “it’s just difficult to have a conversation about this stuff on a general scale because there’s no common framework for it. There are a million little separations and distinctions as it is, and I’m only a novice.”

“You don’t seem to make a good case for yourself,” he says.

I’m not trying to make a case. I try to be polite. I get self conscious, I’ve been told they make fun of me when I’m not there. I’m not embarrassed. I just wish they could understand something I’m talking about. But the worst part is that I realize I don’t even know…

To look at this another way, perhaps it is good that I find myself unable to engage or (pretend to) mediate between to incommensurable discourses.

“Isn’t the theory kind of bullshit?” he says.
“What theory?” I say.
“Political theory,” he says
“Which one, or you mean in general?” I say.

I think he’s talking about what he believes to be Leninism, or maybe just a capitalist view of the USSR. I have no idea. I side step the question and distinguish between politics and philosophy.

“But isn’t that kind of bullshit,” the pianist says under his breath.

I shrug and say it’s very difficult to talk about with someone who isn’t familiar with the same references points, perhaps if we had a piece to talk about, that would be better. Then I feel like I’m being a snob, and cross my arms in a “T” and briefly engage in a bite-size morsel of diachronic v. synchronic time. “A book, a movie… anything really, is more than a relic in periodization; it is also manifest of other times,” I’m a fucking fool, a smarter person, a better communicator could have engaged this in a better way. I’m just trying to learn these things myself. I can’t convince people with the shallow straight-line arguments that we’re all used to.

I stop talking, I shrug.

“It’s different when someone asks,” he says. He feels insulted.
“I didn’t mean you,” I say.

We go into a tunnel. I don’t fucking know, I want to say. I don’t fucking know.

terrorists make the funniest funnies

this is too good:

http://www.probush.com/traitor.htm

…far more interesting than the donor… I mean patriot list. The old me would say that this is scary. The new me knows that a. this is scary because people find it to be scary. b. not everyone will understand silly little jokes. c. I am a very serious patriot and should donate immediately to reaffirm my commitment to nationalism. Jameson would be proud! No gunshot in loud concert here!