Fredric Jameson, "Valences of the Dialectic" (Book Note)

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.