10/30/24, 11:07 PM Review of Valences of the Dialectic : Mediations : Journal of the Marxist Literary Group

Nicholas Brown. "It's Dialectical!." Mediations Volume 24, No. 2

https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/its-dialectical

It's Dialectical!
Nicholas Brown
Valences of the Dialectic
Fredric Jameson
London: Verso, 2009, 625 pp.
US$49.95
9781859848777

Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic is in essence three books: an exhilarating new
book on the dialectic, destined to be counted among the central works in Jameson’s
corpus (Parts I, II, and VI); a virtual third volume of the essay collection Ideologies of
Theory (Parts III and V); and a peculiar middle section (Part IV), which I will
characterize more fully below.

The bracing early chapters of Valences of the Dialectic return to us the useful Hegel, not
the thinker of the One (of teleology, of identity, of the ultimate return of every difference
into the monotony of the same), but rather the unrelenting and almost impossibly
rigorous thinker of the Two, of the fundamental unrest and instability (neither the yin
and yang of complementarity, nor the static field of binary opposition, nor yet the
aporetic abyss of the antinomy, each one of these being rather a disguise for the thought
of the One) that dissolves every certainty in contradiction and propels it forward into
something else which is not, from its own perspective, conceivable. Of course, these two
Hegels, the thinker of the One and of the Two, are the same Hegel, viewed under
different and contradictory aspects. Even if we read, as we should, the final chapter of
the Phenomenology (“On Absolute Knowing”) as utterly in contradiction with the only
ontological (in fact anti-ontological) claim in the Phenomenology (the derivation of
dialectical movement in the Introduction) and as a last-ditch attempt to rescue the
Phenomenology from its most profound implications (from which perspective it can be
made to look like a Brechtian happy end, but it is really more like a Hollywood ending:
for Lukács, Hegel’s teleology was “scarcely comprehensible in view of his method”)
everything still depends on how we read “the identity of identity and difference”
(which appears in its explicit and abstract form only later, in the Logic).1

The formula looks like our everyday stereotype of the Hegelian procedure: the
submission of Difference to the rule of Identity. But we must also read Hegel’s
formulation in the other direction: Every identity contains difference within it;
everything that appears self-contained and solid hides a secret self-contradiction. The
question is not so much which is the “real” Hegel (both procedures are necessary) but
which is the tonic chord of the Hegelian dialectic — or, better, to extend the metaphor,
whether the dialectic is, in fact, constructed around a tonic chord, every dissonance and
unresolved tension in exile from resolution even when resolution is treated as
anathema; or whether, on the contrary, it is constructed around an unresolved
dominant, seething with tension and potential movement even when seemingly at rest.
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Once the question assumes this enlarged dimension, however, it becomes
correspondingly more difficult to decide, and Jameson’s answer, bypassing a great deal
that might be said in the way of “theological niceties,” is that only the second Hegel is
interesting.

The first chapter, “The Three Names of the Dialectic” (a version of which was presented
at the Marxist Literary Group’s Summer Institute on Culture and Society in Chicago in
2007), raises three possibilities: “the dialectic” as a system or method, “many dialectics”
as a set of operations which can be found across disciplines and discourses, and “it’s
dialectical!” as a name for the effect of the dialectic, for the sudden widening of the
conceptual field that accompanies the transformation of an apparently discrete
phenomenon into a moment within a larger force field. The first of these will be the
most obviously problematic — even as the title of the book insists, despite a more
ambiguous discussion of the matter in this chapter (11-12), that a sense of “the” dialectic
is nonetheless necessary — while the second will demonstrate its own unsatisfactory
nature by way of a catalog of “dialectical moments in the work of non- or anti-
dialectical thinkers” (15). The key moment here is that of structuralism and the
discovery of binary opposition as a generative principle of meaning and, in a negative
corollary, as the very form of ideology and error. This then permits a new staging of the
emergence of the dialectic. In Hegel, opposition was to be derived from something else,
namely Verstand or the law of noncontradiction. After the brief reign of the binary
opposition and the longer reign of its deconstruction, the dialectic can be revealed to be
the truth of that relationship, such that “any opposition can be the starting point for a
dialectic in its own right” (19); or, more strongly put, “it is the unmasking of [static]
antinomy as [dynamic] contradiction which constitutes truly dialectical thinking as
such” (43). Now a dialectic can be identified in Coleridge, in Mondrian, in the Aeneid, in
the thought of a Foucault or a Deleuze, and of course the examples of those who are
“dialectical without knowing it” (67) can be multiplied almost infinitely; in the hands of
a Žižek (on Deleuze, for example) this game becomes almost a sport, though here it is
played in earnest. Particularly productive in this section is a kind of typology that
emerges, such that several distinct procedures, both within and outside of the explicitly
dialectical tradition, can all be shown to be “dialectical” in some substantial sense.

However, what we have arrived at by way of this second moment is nothing less than
the singular “method” which was to be avoided in the first, and indeed this immanent
method delivers us at the feet of a set of discursive regularities, of laws to be discovered
— “laws” being, however, the target of the dialectic from the beginning (in those
interminable passages on the physical sciences in the Phenomenology) and which only
reinstate themselves within it by way of what now seem deplorable — but at the same
time almost charming — Engelsisms. In a first approach, the problem can be avoided by
returning to a conception of the dialectic as purely reactive, as a practice of disruptive
guerrilla raids on Verstand, reified thinking, common sense. (And indeed, as with the
two Hegels above, the thought of the Two cannot function without the thought of the
One; the dialectic presumes common sense; if the latter were really defeated, the former
would have nothing on which to operate. The complication is, to get ahead of ourselves,
that Verstand is not stable but is rather itself implicated in the movement of the
dialectic). But this guerilla dialectic begins to look both familiar and harmless; it has
become a matter of rediscovering some old tools, providing a new genealogy and
perhaps a gratifyingly militant tone for the deconstructive attitude. The difference
between the dialectic and this attitude — a difference which becomes obvious in Marx

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— is, however, already fully present in Hegel, in his insistence that the dialectic was
already an operation in the object itself, leaving noumenal squeamishness to the
Kantians. This is, then, the explosive force of the central Hegelian claim for the “reality
of the appearance,” or that “the essence must appear”: the insight that Verstand is not
just “in here” in consciousness, but “out there” in the world itself: in more modern
terms, reality is itself ideological. The wage relation, for example, disguises the essence
of labor-power, but the wage relation is not only an ideological construct but also
something objectively “out there” in society. The dialectic does not attack appearances
in the name of an essence that lies outside them; nor does it attack them in the hopes of
merely loosening their hold on thought; rather, it takes hold of them from the inside in
the name of another appearance that is already immanent in them. The dialectic, the
dereification of thought, is also the dereification of the world, the edifice of facts turned
into a tissue of potentialities.

“The Three Names of the Dialectic,” however, includes four names, the supplementary
possibility being the “spatial dialectic.” The term has caused some confusion and even
suspicion; matters can be clarified by understanding first that the spatial dialectic is still
historical. We are really talking here more about making space dialectical than about
making the dialectic spatial; the point is to outfit the dialectic for a moment when space
is a conceptual dominant, for reasons that are entirely historical in the strong sense.
When the dialectic stalls in the Aesthetics, Hegel often gets things moving by means of a
leap from one “civilization” to another — but this leap is often immediate, which is to
say, precisely undialectical, so these leaps would be the task of a spatial dialectic to
explain, rather than its source. Still, one has only to remember that Phenomenology of
Spirit itself is far from straightforwardly chronological to realize that the dialectic is
there already spatial. Indeed, many of the relationships in the Phenomenology are
explicitly spatial ones: the recurrent problem of the “beyond,” which it is the particular
task of the dialectic to hunt down and destroy wherever it appears; the realms of the
netherworld and the city that organize the oppositions in the Antigone section (and
many of the other dialectical pairings can now be seen to be spatial as well: lord and
bondsman, virtue and the way of the world, inner and outer in the observation of
nature, and so on); or finally the “typological” reading which the Phenomenology permits
(the beautiful soul, the unhappy consciousness, the law of the heart, and so on), from
which perspective the types can be thought of as locations — or at least temptations
native to locations — in social space. And, of course, once we move beyond Hegel
(Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Cardoso, Amin…), a spatial dialectic, not named as
such but already specifically global, begins to emerge as a mode of thinking in its own
right. It has yet to be isolated and theorized under its own name, and Jameson does the
former but not yet the latter here. However, the theoretical aim of the diverse projects of
the São Paulo “school” — Valences is dedicated to Grécia de la Sobera and Roberto
Schwarz — in the various disciplines (sociology, history, literary studies, economics,
history) is precisely to produce a spatial dialectic, and if one wants to get a sense of
what a spatial dialectic would look like in practice, one could do a lot worse than look
at the Dossier: Brazil issue of this journal
(http://www.mediationsjournal.org/toc/23_1.).

The second chapter is equally stimulating but more difficult to summarize. Essentially,
it is a guided tour of the Encyclopedia Logic, organized through the itinerary of vulgar
understanding or Verstand, which itself is no stable term but rather assumes various
forms as the Logic unfolds. Here, some theological niceties can really not be avoided,

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particularly with regard to the problem of the “where” or the space in which the Logic
unfolds: any such homogeneous space will immediately, no matter how interesting the
local content, force us back into the bad Hegel of “Absolute Spirit” as omniscient
narrator. Jameson’s solution here is, if I am not mistaken, very much in line with his
earlier reading of the Phenomenology: the space of the Logic is heterogeneous from one
moment to the next. That is, 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 (though
Jameson cannot expunge the vertical metaphor altogether), but rather wider with
reference to the moment that preceded it. The real innovation here, however, and the
meat of the chapter, is to identify Verstand with reification, and so to turn the venerable
(that is, tedious) question of “Marx’s Hegelianism” on its head: the Logic, even more
than the Master-Slave dialectic, turns out to give us a clue to “Hegel’s Marxism” (100).

This brings us to “Hegel’s Contemporary Critics,” and the first thing to be said about
those critics of Hegel that are worth talking about here — Derrida, Deleuze, Blanchot,
and (barely) Foucault — is that they are all dead (though some of them continue to
publish), making one wonder whether we are talking about contemporary anti-
Hegelians or rather an anti-Hegelian moment whose time has come and gone. To be
sure, North American doxa still clings to the insights and arguments of this largely
French moment (but the former has for Jameson always been a doxa of “camp-
followers,” the worst insult in a deceptively mild lexicon where even “extraordinary”
can be intended merely literally), and (this) dialectic will always have its enemies on the
Right; just as surely there is and always will be plenty of simply undialectical thinking
going on at various levels of real and imagined sophistication (though one of Jameson’s
more arresting theses is that the dialectic is a mode of thinking native to Utopia itself,
and that the historical moments of its elaboration have been windows onto it). But I
have the sense that “our” wholesale critiques of Hegel (critiques directed from a
perceptive and intelligent Left) have had their day. The post-Deleuzian neo-Spinozists
are perhaps an exception (even if the best of them are “dialectical without knowing it”),
but we won’t see an engagement with them until much later in the book. This chapter,
then, is as much a settling of accounts — a What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Critique
of Hegel — as it is a set of arguments. One is treated in this staging to a series of defenses
of the dialectic against some of its most worthy opponents, while later engagements
with some of the same thinkers will assume a more dialectical form.

It is hard to imagine a mode of summary that would do here: suffice it to say that in
these brief encounters (with Glas, Différence et répétition, and, less obviously, Foucault’s
1966 essay “La Pensée du dehors”), Hegel will generally turn out to have been either
summarized where we thought he was being critiqued, foundational to the critique
itself, or waiting patiently where we thought something new was being said. But while
these engagements take the form of a series of arguments, sometimes clearly
exasperated ones, a later chapter on Derrida, which responds to Specters of Marx, is both
more generous and less direct; indeed much of it is given over to explication and to
chasing down the resonances that situate spectrality as central to the Derridean corpus.
The strategy there will be twofold: on one hand not to fall into the trap Derrida has laid
by attempting to disperse too soon the ghosts of arguments that flit through the text
(though brushing away a few misapprehensions cannot be resisted); and on the other to
include Derrida’s critique within Marxism: spectrality and its cognates are what Utopia
looks like when the attempt is made to think it in an historical moment when Utopia
itself is unthinkable. (On this account, Derrida becomes a symptom of a situation that

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affects all Left thinking today in one way or another, non-Marxist and Marxist alike).
The full Deleuze chapter, meanwhile, hews more closely to the case made here: that
there is an irresolvable tension or antinomy between the monism of desire, avowed as
fundamental in Deleuze, and the various dualisms that proliferate in Deleuze’s work —
but which are also essential, though in a more subterranean way, to the functioning of
the Deleuzian machine. Once such an antinomy has been produced, it becomes, as we
have seen, ripe for the dialectical picking.

We turn, then, to Part III (the long initial chapter having received a Part of its own), and
to familiar material. Chapters 4 and 5 (the commentaries on Derrida and Deleuze
mentioned above) appeared in New Left Review and South Atlantic Quarterly. Chapters 7
and 8 reprint introductions to Volumes 1 and 2 of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason,
and are not, to me at least, as interesting as the rest of this section. Chapter 6, which
appeared in the first issue of Rethinking Marxism, is Jameson’s striking solution to the
“intersectionality” problem — a problem which is still with us despite having a name
that declares itself solved in advance. This chapter is other things as well — a defense of
Totality (the concept, not the thing) as well as a reappraisal of Lukács’s legacy for
aesthetic thought — but, most importantly, it issues a challenge to complete Lukács
rather than to repudiate him: that is, not to assail the (narrow-minded, old-fashioned,
“workerist”) privileging of class standpoint as epistemological fulcrum, but rather to
repeat it with race, gender, sexuality, subalternity, or indeed anything else: in other
words, to produce the insights to which this or that standpoint provides privileged
access. Jameson singles out feminist science studies as the principal example, and Fanon
stands in, one presumes, for a whole range of insights which continue up to the present
day (one thinks, for example, of the very different projects of Roberto Schwarz and
Paulin Hountondji); the challenge has also been explicitly taken up for queer theory by,
among others, Kevin Floyd in a book reviewed in this issue. One might open up
possibilities beyond the usual “intersectional” suspects by considering that Pierre
Bourdieu’s defense of the specificity of intellectual production — established as it was
via the particular location of intellectuals in social space (“the dominated fraction of the
dominant class”) as well as the specific conditions of production that distinguish
academic from journalistic investigation (the centrality of a more or less self-regulated
“restricted field”) — might be recast as an answer to such a call. What distinguishes
Jameson’s enlarged Lukácsian imperative from the complacent injunction to believe
what you believe because it’s your belief is precisely the “aspiration to Totality”
(Lukács, of course): that is, the posited identity of the ultimate object of all these
different analyses or, in an older parlance, a commitment to truth. It is worth noting that
at the time of this essay (1988), Jameson was willing to concede that “one does not
argue with the Zeitgeist” (210), by which he meant that one might make an argument
against this or that position against Totality, but that the aversion to Totality itself can
only be considered historically, approached as a symptom. My sense is that, more than
two decades later, something has changed in that one can argue with that Zeitgeist,
which is to say that it is no longer quite our Zeitgeist, that the aversion to Totality is no
longer as hegemonic for the intellectual Left as it once was. This reversal would, in turn,
have to be approached as a symptom, a project which Jameson does not undertake here
— though it would be entirely plausible to relate it to the closure of the world market,
which has entered the Zeitgeist in the allegorical figure of the globe as an ecological or
economic totality.

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The next section, “Entries” from some possible dictionary of dialectical thinking, is
problematic, though it, too, contains some essential reading. Jameson is not a
pedagogue in quite this way, and there is something jarring about seeing dialectical
ideas laid out in nondialectical form. (What would Hegel’s Logic have to say if it really
looked like a conventional encyclopedia?) The notes are all there, but the breathing is
wrong. Plenty has been said about Jameson’s “style,” and someone has no doubt noted
that his arguments tend to proceed through a series of temporal adverbs: “now,”
“then,” “meanwhile,” “suddenly,” “immediately,” “slowly,” “at this point,” “initially,”
“for the moment,” “finally.” The indispensability of these adverbs is part of the rhetoric
of the dialectic, and part also of what makes Jameson so difficult to understand for
those who have no sympathy for it: the sentence under consideration is true from the
perspective, as it were, of the sentence itself; its content is liable to be overturned in the
next one. All this temporal architecture tends to disappear in this middle section, the
major exceptions being the two “entries” on Lenin and Rousseau. The argument about
Rousseau is going to show a surprising family resemblance to the one about Deleuze
(“dialectical without knowing it”), and the one about Lenin is indispensable reading,
both for its clarification of what “the economic” means within Marxism and for the
counterintuitive conclusion about what a Left politics concretely entails today. I quote
the latter, a truly dialectical proposition, out of context here in the hopes that readers
will be provoked to read the essay in its entirety: “We must support social democracy
because its inevitable failure constitutes the basic lesson, the fundamental pedagogy, of
a genuine Left” (299).

This brings us squarely into the matter of Part V, “Politics.” Here, also, much of the
material has been published before. Two of these essays will be familiar: “Globalization
as a Philosophical Issue,” which is already a standard reference point, and
“Globalization as Political Strategy.”2 A relatively unfamiliar essay will probably be the
first one in this section, on “Actually Existing Marxism,” an updated version of an
article first published in 1993, at the height of American triumphalism over the “death
of Communism.” The thesis is one I believe we have seen elsewhere, but fully
elaborated here, namely that since “Marxism is the science of capitalism,” Marxism can
scarcely be expected to disappear until capitalism does; or, if it did, that it would have
to be reinvented. Jameson divides the question into several parts, essentially: What is
Marxism today, and what is it not? What is socialism today, and what is it not? What is
revolution today, and what is it not? What was communism, and what was it not? And,
what is capitalism today, and what does Marxism present as a response? To followers of
Jameson’s work there will not be many surprises, though there are enough new
epicycles to contemplate with interest; but rarely is Jameson, clear-eyed as always, so
forthright and, though the language is dispassionate, so stirring in his conviction about
the positions his work both presumes and entails.

The remaining chapter in this section is new: “Utopia as Replication.” It is a brief essay
but one with deep roots, revisiting Jameson’s contribution to the concept of Utopia.
Jameson illustrates his “method” — ”strategy” or even “technique” is closer to the right
word — via the two utopias of Wal-Mart and, more scandalous yet, the multitude. The
idea is to find a perspective, or produce one, from which an object can be narrativized
into an allegory of a transformed world. There are cases when this perspective is given
to us with the object itself (a painting by Van Gogh); we have only to look over the
shoulder of the allegorizer. With other cases this perspective is only arrived through our
own allegorical effort. In the case of Wal-Mart, it is largely a matter of highlighting its

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unique place in the economy: to simplify drastically, the fact that its enormous size and
power in relationship to its industrial suppliers can condense complex and, in the long
view, untenable relationships between sectors into a single figure. With the multitude, it
is (on this account) Paolo Virno who is doing the allegorizing; we are looking on as he
changes the valences of the traditional conservative critiques of modernity and turns
them into harbingers of the future.

One remembers that Utopianism used to be an insult on the Left, referring to radical
postures with no practical political program (essentially, no Party in the abstract sense
of a mediatory collective) behind them. Jameson’s good Utopianism perfectly
“replicates” the old, bad Utopianism; what is different is a political situation that now
no longer seems to offer a practical political program of any kind, such that, on the Left,
Utopianism has no other. Its only other is on the Right, in the insistence that any radical
alternative is either impossible on its face or destined for totalitarianism. In this
situation, the preservation of a Utopian vision is, however minimal, the precondition
for any future politics: “Such a revival of futurity and of the positing of alternate futures
is not itself a political program nor even a political practice: but it is hard to see how any
durable or effective political action could come into being without it” (434). The
minimal precondition laid out in this form may be misleading, however. What Jameson
does not say here, but which is implicit everywhere else, is that Marxism is not Utopian
in only this sense, but in another one which already goes beyond it to find a mediating
link (Party being only one possible mediation) between the Utopian and the actual. Hic
rhodus, hic salta: Aesop’s punch line meant different things to Hegel and Marx, but they
both understood it to embody something fundamental. We might translate it into our
own historical moment as: no matter how long the march, it must start here. The
insistence on the national situation that permeates all of Jameson’s work derives from
this imperative, because the nation is, for better and for worse, the only form of political
collectivity that is actual today; similarly with the injunction to “support social
democracy because it will fail,” a Left politics which is far from ideal but which offers,
for precisely that reason, the benefit of intervening in the actual. Jameson’s are not the
only possible ways to answer this imperative, and not all of them will be compatible
(while, on the contrary and much to the point, all Utopian allegories will be: Jameson
will endorse the multitude precisely as far as it is an allegorical “reading” of
contemporary society, in other words science fiction; beyond that, he falls silent [see
433]). But any framework that leaves out this mediation or, aware of the difficulty,
reserves a place for Elijah, is, to revive a cliché, insufficiently dialectical.

There’s a certain logic in the placement of the final chapter, but I don’t see any good
reason to postpone the reading of it until after the 350 pages of the three middle
sections, which have a unity that is no more than thematic and can be read in any order;
it would be best not to arrive exhausted at this demanding Part VI. I will not be able to
do justice to it here, but it seems to me that this chapter (really a short book in itself)
strikes out for radically new territory. The first chapters of Valences are dedicated in the
main to a certain explication of the dialectic and a demonstration of its persistence; this
requires taking account of all kinds of new phenomena and situations, but does not
itself reach beyond the dialectic as Jameson finds it. The mode in this final chapter is
still commentary (the first part is given over largely to a meditation on Paul Ricoeur’s
Temps et récit), but the point is now not to wear down the points of friction between
Ricoeur’s account of time and a dialectical one, but rather to produce something new
from the encounter: a nonvulgar account of time. Opening this chapter with Derrida’s

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“it is always too late to talk about time,” Jameson knows that any classical approach to
this project will be doomed at the outset: a satisfactory concept of time is not going to
emerge. On the other hand, time itself will be made to emerge as an effect of something
else. (Though it is not invoked here, something similar happens in Phenomenology of
Spirit, where time does not arise as a problem precisely because it emerges as the
solution to another problem.)

What this “something else” might be is prefigured in Jameson’s retranslation of

Aristotle’s definition of time in the Physics. Heidegger had, in a typical move, translated
it in such a way as to prioritize a phenomenal horizon. In Jameson’s translation,
Aristotle’s definition is flattened into a mere juxtaposition of temporalities: “time is the
number of motion in respect of ‘before’ and ‘after.’” This is, obviously, no definition at
all, but a list of things required to make time appear: movement (in what we are to
understand is a particularly Greek sense), number, and before and after. The discussion
here of Aristotle’s Physics is no more than a prolegomenon, and yet it gives a sense of
what is to come, for the project here will be to speak through (and to some extent
against) Ricoeur in order to suggest that time is what emerges in the gaps and frictions
between different processes, sequences, or temporalities. (These latter terms already
presuppose a concept of time: is always too late to talk about time). Such temporal
incommensurability can be as familiar as the everyday disjunction between “subjective”
and “objective” time, or as elaborate as Heidegger’s temporal categories (Jameson
counts nine), and several other sets of juxtapositions are mentioned in passing. A
privileged example, which foreshadows the concerns of the second part of this chapter,
will be the three temporalities that govern Braudelian historiography.

This only gets Jameson half as far as he wants to go: history does not automatically
appear alongside time. What is history, and how does one make it appear? As with the
question of time, the question is one of totalization: the assembly of multiple and in
themselves disparate temporalities — in Braudel’s version, that of the earth, of
institutions, of individual actions — into a followable narrative. The processes
themselves are of course multiple and shifting, as it is still a critical commonplace to
insist. But to do justice to these processes in their radical particularity is not enough to
make history appear; rather, the conflict between temporalities has to be narrativized,
and this requires a process of totalization to put them into determinate relations with
each other. But now this narrative totalization takes place at a scale where the very idea
of narrative would seem to be illegitimate — that is, at a scale where to apply the
anthropomorphic categories that seem to emerge spontaneously in the discussion of
fictional narrative would be “humanist” in the worst sense. This is, indeed, where
Jameson parts company most decisively with Ricoeur. The latter collapses history into
narrative by privileging the scale of human action. Jameson, however, is concerned to
deanthropomorphize the narrative categories themselves (here, Ricoeur’s Aristotelian
ones: reversal, recognition, pathos), which must now be interrogated and expanded to
the point that their fictional application becomes merely a special case.

The illustrations that accompany these conceptual enlargements are fascinating in

themselves, but I will pass them over to emphasize the key category of pathos, which is
an even more complex matter than the discussions of peripeteia and anagnorisis that
precede it. Essentially, here, pathos is coming-to-appearance of plot itself, the “tableau”
in which a tragic plot culminates; in an historical register, it is, for example, the Event
(but this is only one of several modes) in which history is made to appear. (This may be
stretch, but Aristotle is no longer at stake here.) It is, then, a kind of reification of history,
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a way in which multiple trajectories intersect to produce something that can be
assembled into a single narrative. Simplifying a great deal and leaving out at least one
fundamental complication, it appears that two modes of such totalization are essential
here: history as system and history as event. The first of these is the unification of
diverse actors and motives, some of them deeply antagonistic and contradictory, into a
massive homeostasis that results at most in a creeping expansion or hardening. The
second is also a unification of diverse series, contingencies, and accidents, but here in
the mode of will and action; at the limit, of revolution. (In fact, both are separations as
well as unifications: the homeostatic system is an array of forces in tension, and the
revolutionary event is their precipitation into antagonism. Thus, System assembles
separation under unification, and Event precipitates unification under separation.) But
it is not enough to produce either one of these totalizations alone. Both procedures are
necessary: “The experience of History is impossible without this dual perspective of
system and event. Each without the other falls short of History and into another
category altogether: the isolated sense of unity becoming philosophy and metaphysics,
the experience of merely empirical events becoming at best existential narrative and at
worst a kind of inert or positivistic knowledge” (603).

The grounding of historical thought undertaken in this final section is not just a
defense, an explication, a deployment, or an elaboration of the dialectic; it is a profound
contribution to dialectical thought. It is curious that neither Hegel nor Marx questions
the being of History in this way. But then Hegel and Marx lived in historical times and
did not face the task the Jameson has set himself: to make history appear.

1. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT P, 1971) 147.

2. The acknowledgments page gets the title and publication information wrong for
this essay, which appeared in New Left Review 4 (2000): 49-68. As is hardly
uncommon, the index and copyediting could have been a lot better.

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