Understanding Jameson’s Preface to “Marxism and Form”

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.

Left Forum: student as student, student as reader, writer, one-day intellectual

So also in Sartre, for whom it must be said, in spite of his emphasis on our pro-jection forward in time, that the future remains imaginary in the most morbid sense: nothing, indeed, draws down the whole corrosive force of Sartean irony more surely than the mere wish to change in the future, or, what amounts to the same thing, the wish to have changed in the past: idle daydreams, or remorse. Such wishes in reality have their function in the present alone: one wants to change (think of the horror of Electra when her bloody daydreams are–as though through some terrible misunderstanding–actually realized) in order to feel oneself superior to an intolerable present, only to dissociate oneself mentally from a present reality one does not care to see. (Marxism and Form, page 139. Fredric Jameson.)

Left Forum is officially over. So it’s Sunday night. We started out at six AM yesterday. My last moments on the top floor of Pace University after staring out the window to the Brooklyn Bridge, the old buildings of New Amsterdam, and the reappearance of warm-weather haze, I stared out the window. This is the left of 2010.

Being young during a financial, social, educational crisis is lonely. The left is lonely for a student who wrote for the Idea and maybe only for the intended reader. I wrote because I read The Coming Insurrection, I wrote because I read about California, Rachel Smith. Today, I was around some people who were stuck in “orthodoxy” and people who were in full engagement with the Communist Hypothesis.

Bruno Bosteels opened up the Badiou panel (quoting with the highest attempts to faithfulness from my notes:

Should we have confidence in the old masters? … What is it like to be a young communist? … Shouldn’t we start with active forgetfulness? Can we really ignore the longer history? … What do we do in search of the “everyday” communism; what happens in a communism that is everywhere and no where? Badiou displaces the possible to the impossible. … Politics as Idea… Idea with a capital I and History with a capital H.

and Boris Groys (not directly quoting b/c of scattered notes):

What does it mean to be faithful to the communist idea? It is possible to be faithful the communist idea by faithfully returning to point zero, and there is faithfulness in following communism to the letter. In the former, there is a constant returning and erasure. To be faithful, one must be willing to break with the project. … How can we be faithful to Marxism? the Revolution? … [Being committed to the communist] Spirit means going further and further. … The withering of the state is a problematic program.

[I heard the last sentence many times and in many different groups.]

Groys also said that he is ambiguous to Badiou’s writing; it touches on the main impulses of society but his selection of arguments and facts are problematic. [Badiou] always looks at the bright side of things, nothing bad ever really happens…

But I am thinking that perhaps there is a reason why Badiou might be so hopelessly bright; in a very bad version of a similar Badiou panel I responded to Revolution Books or who-the-fuck-ever they were that you couldn’t “apply” Badiou’s conception of the “event” onto (what have become) stogy examples of second-wave Maoist examples and 1917 directions. In his speech “Thinking the Event” it is most clear that the event is precisely at a distance from political power because it is a philosophical project of incommensurabilty that can’t be translated or quantified onto older movements, or any political formation, directly.

the Idea; the idea is everywhere–the possibility and the Idea and a few writers who don’t even know my name, a few mentors, and even fewer friends. And me–and books and me. And the man on the corner that I can see looking up at the sky-scraper in construction. Lonely work for students, these days. Lonely work because I’ve already broken with the rhetoric of Revolution Books but the thinkers who I most look up to are in company with each other. It is getting better: maybe just because I’m here now and that makes a difference. But labor panels still talk about Greek labor unions and “flexible,” “irregular” labor forces without mentioning students. Without mentioning Communique or The Coming Insurrection or immigration or social security…

And at lunch today during a good conversation I realized that writing is the act that allows the reader (well, the reader and the writer who’s like me) to follow the tradition of other pieces that influence it. The pieces speak to each other from time to time–the beginning of epochs and the ends of them and the beginnings, again. There was a good chunk of time that I thought the handing-out of writings, the immediate and “responding” audience should care the way I was invested in writing as a thought-process. I mean… this might be old news to you, but writing might have just changed my life again. The Idea is bright, such is the nature of beginning again.

Marxism and Form: T.W. Adorno

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?

If you leave me alone for long enough I start writing in my notebook

And then when I come on here there’s no choice but to call it blargh-ing. I can’t tell you how excited I am for the Agamben, et al book Democracy in What State?. I think that there were parts written in French and new bits added in English (trans by William McCuaig). I rifled through CUP’s computer and printed it out weeks ago. I want that hard copy so I can write forever about it. Also waiting for Marxism and Form to come in the mail to I can start reading that.

I’m turning 21 tomorrow.

and then spring break next week. I sincerely promise to read and do real work on here, less blarg-ing. And less poetry–it’s getting to me.