Fredric Jamesons Valences of the
Dialectic consists of three parts: a new book on the dialectic, a third volume
of the essay collection Ideologies of Theory, and a middle section. The book
focuses on Hegel's thought of the Two, which is characterized by fundamental
unrest and instability that dissolves certainty in contradiction and propels it
forward into something else. The book explores the concept of the dialectic as
a system or method, a set of operations across disciplines and discourses, and
the effect of the dialectic on the conceptual field.
The first chapter, "The Three Names of the Dialectic," discusses the
dialectic as a system or method, "many dialectics" as a set of
operations across disciplines and discourses, and "it's dialectical!"
as a name for the effect of the dialectic. The key moment in this chapter is
the discovery of binary opposition as a generative principle of meaning and the
form of ideology and error. This allows for a new staging of the emergence of
the dialectic, which can be identified in various thinkers, such as Coleridge,
Mondrian, Aeneid, Foucault, and Deleuze. The book also presents a typology of
distinct procedures that can be shown to be "dialectical" in some
substantial sense.
The second moment of the text presents a singular "method" that was
to be avoided in the first, leading to a set of discursive regularities and
laws to be discovered. The dialectic is not stable but is implicated in the
movement of the dialectic, which is both familiar and harmless. The difference
between the dialectic and this attitude is already fully present in Hegel, who
insists that the dialectic was already an operation in the object itself. This
is the explosive force of the central Hegelian claim for the "reality of
the appearance," or that "the essence must appear."
The book also includes four names, including the "spatial dialectic,"
which has caused some confusion and suspicion. It is important to understand
that the spatial dialectic is still historical and aims to outfit the dialectic
for a moment when space is a conceptual dominant. The Phenomenology of Spirit
itself is far from straightforwardly chronological, but many relationships in
the Phenomenology are explicitly spatial ones.
The second chapter is stimulating but more difficult to summarize. It is a
guided tour of the Encyclopedia Logic, organized through the itinerary of
vulgar understanding or Verstand, which assumes various forms as the Logic
unfolds. Jameson's solution is that the space of the Logic is heterogeneous
from one moment to the next, and the movement from one contradiction to another
in the text is not so much to be thought of as a movement higher in some
absolute space but rather wider with reference to the moment that preceded it.
The real innovation here is to identify Verstand with reification, turning the
venerable question of "Marx's Hegelianism" on its head.
"Hegel's Contemporary Critics" by Jameson explores the fading
influence of critics like Derrida, Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault on
contemporary anti-Hegelian thought. The book suggests that the dialectic has
its enemies on the Right, and post-Deleuzian neo-Spinozists may be an
exception. The chapter presents a series of defenses of the dialectic against
some of its most worthy opponents, while later engagements with these thinkers
will assume a more dialectical form.
The chapter addresses Hegel's critique of spectrality within Marxism, arguing
that it is central to the Derridean corpus. The full Deleuze chapter hews
closer to the case made here, arguing that there is an irresolvable tension
between the monism of desire in Deleuze and the various dualisms that
proliferate in his work. Once this tension is produced, it becomes ripe for
dialectical picking.
In Part III, Jameson addresses the "intersectionality" problem,
defending Totality and reappraising Lukács's legacy for aesthetic thought. It
challenges the narrow-minded privileging of class standpoint as epistemological
fulcrum and argues for the production of insights to which this or that
standpoint provides privileged access. Jameson singles out feminist science
studies as the principal example, and Fanon stands in for a range of insights
that continue up to the present day.
The chapter also discusses Pierre Bourdieu's defense of the specificity of
intellectual production, which can be recast as an answer to the
"intersectionality" problem. The author suggests that the aversion to
Totality is no longer as hegemonic for the intellectual Left as it once was,
and this reversal would have to be approached as a symptom.
The text discusses the work of Jameson, a philosopher and political thinker,
who presents his ideas in nondialectical form. His arguments often involve
temporal adverbs, making it difficult for readers to understand his arguments.
However, the two "entries" on Lenin and Rousseau are particularly
noteworthy. The argument about Rousseau is similar to Deleuze's dialectical
approach, while the argument about Lenin is essential for understanding the
economic meaning within Marxism and the counterintuitive conclusion about Left
politics today.
The text then moves into Part V, "Politics," which includes essays on
globalization as a philosophical issue and globalization as a political
strategy. The first essay, "Actually Existing Marxism," argues that
Marxism can scarcely disappear until capitalism does, or if it did, it would
have to be reinvented. Jameson divides the question into several parts,
focusing on what is Marxism today, socialism, revolution, communism, and
capitalism.
The remaining chapter, "Utopia as Replication," revisits Jameson's contribution
to the concept of Utopia. He uses the utopias of Wal-Mart and the multitude to
illustrate his "method" of finding a perspective from which an object
can be narrativized into an allegory of a transformed world. Utopianism used to
be an insult on the Left, but Jameson's good Utopianism perfectly
"replicates" the old, bad Utopianism.
Jameson's Utopianism goes beyond this sense, finding a mediating link between
the Utopian and the actual. The nation is the only form of political
collectivity that is actual today, and Jameson's work derives from this
imperative. However, not all Utopian allegories will be compatible, and any
framework that leaves out this mediation or reserves a place for Elijah is
insufficiently dialectical.
The final chapter of Jameson's book, Valences, is a commentary on the dialectic
and its persistence. The author aims to produce a nonvulgar account of time by
addressing the friction between Ricoeur's account of time and a dialectical
one. Jameson's translation of Aristotle's definition of time into a mere
juxtaposition of temporalities, such as movement, number, and before and after,
provides a sense of what is to come.
The author also discusses the three temporalities that govern Braudelian
historiography. He believes that history does not automatically appear
alongside time, but rather, it is made to appear through totalization. This
involves assembling multiple and disparate temporalities into a followable
narrative. The conflict between temporalities must be narrativized, and this
requires a process of totalization to put them into determinate relations with
each other.
Jameson is concerned with deanthropomorphizing the narrative categories
themselves, such as Ricoeur's Aristotelian ones like reversal, recognition, and
pathos. He emphasizes the key category of pathos, which is the
coming-to-appearance of plot itself and the Event in an historical register.
Two modes of totalization are essential: history as system and history as
event. The first involves unifying diverse actors and motives into a massive
homeostasis, while the second involves unifying diverse series, contingencies,
and accidents in the mode of will and action.
The grounding of historical thought undertaken in this final section is not
just a defense, explication, deployment, or elaboration of the dialectic but a
profound contribution to dialectical thought. It is surprising that neither
Hegel nor Marx questions the being of History in this way, but they lived in
historical times and did not face the task Jameson has set himself: to make
history appear.
Friday, 11 October 2024
Fredric Jameson, "Valences of the Dialectic" (Book Note)
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