Jameson On Making History Appear1

Ray Brassier

The difficulty of thinking about time is a consequence of the problem of objectifying time. I
propose to introduce this problem by examining Fredric Jameson’s approach to it in his remarkable
essay, “The Valences of History.”2 Initially, I will summarize what I think is the methodological
problem in thinking time, and then I will critically discuss Bergson’s attempts at resolving this
problem in relation to Kant, Heidegger, and Ricoeur. Finally, I will present Jameson’s novel
recasting of the problem and consider some of its ramifications.

The Methodological Problem

The attempt to think time poses a methodological problem because time is no ordinary object or
phenomenon. The philosophical theorizing of time is split between the metaphysical and
phenomenological approaches. Metaphysics asks: What is time? Phenomenology asks: How do we
experience time?

Aristotle is the paradigmatic exemplar of the metaphysical approach. Despite or perhaps because of
it, he construes time as a physical phenomenon: time is “the number of movement in respect of
before and after.”3 Time is defined in terms of the more fundamental notions of number, movement,
and sequence (“before/after”). It is often objected that “before/after” is a temporal distinction, so
that Aristotle’s definition begs the question. But “before/after” can be taken to mean “earlier than”
or “later than,” which are determinations of order that apply to synchronic structures, so that the
notion of atemporal sequencing is perfectly intelligible.

Still, the metaphysical approach faces two problems: What data are we to take as preeminently
temporal—physical, biological, historical and/or psychological? If time is the number of motion,
does this mean that motionlessness is equivalent to timelessness? But surely motionlessness itself is
conceived as a state during which time passes. Does this mean time’s passing is irreducible to
objective measure? If we cannot determine which data qualify as intrinsically temporal, then we
cannot determine which phenomenon should provide the starting point for our metaphysical
investigation into the nature of time. Moreover, if metaphysics asks what kind of thing time is, this
investigation may misfire from the start precisely insofar as time cannot be conceived as any kind of
thing.

The most common objection to the objective definition of time is that it cannot adequately account
for our experience of the passing of time—a phenomenon that seems to be independent of every
objective measure. This difficulty is famously formulated by Augustine:

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I
know not: yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, time past were not; and
if nothing were coming, a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were
not. Those two times then, past and to come, how are they, seeing the past now is not, and
that to come is not yet? But the present, should it always be present, and never pass into time
past, verily it should not be time, but eternity. If time present (if it is to be time) only cometh

1 Originally published in Angela Harutyunyan and Nat Muller (eds.) This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time,
(Beirut: AUB Press, 2015), 32-39.
2 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 475-612
3 Aristotle, Physics, bk. 4, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 11: 220a, 24, 387.

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 into existence, because it passeth into time past, how can we say that either this is, whose
cause of being is, that it shall not be; so, namely, that we cannot truly say that time is, but
because it is tending not to be?4

Time is ontologically anomalous. If we think of the present as what is, its positive consistency is
riven by two negations, both of which are internal to it: the present that is not yet and the present
that it has been. The consistency of the actual present is punctured by both these absent presences,
on which it turns out to be dependent. Thus Augustine was driven to think what is not yet and what
has been as constitutive of what is actually present; such that the present exists as the distension
encompassing the anticipation of what is not yet as well as the retention of what is no longer. The
distended present of consciousness exists as the differential articulation of past and future presents.
This is, of course, a view that anticipates Husserl’s account of the living present as structured by the
interplay of retention and protention, as well as Heidegger’s account of ek-static temporalization.5

Taking this distension as its starting point, the phenomenological approach is more sensitive to the
danger of reifying time. But it faces a fundamental problem; one which becomes apparent once we
distinguish the three registers of time:

• Subjective: time as individual experience; phenomenological/existential

• Historical: time as collective experience; political/institutional/archaeological
• Objective:time as impersonal and non-experiential;
physical/biological/geological/cosmological.

The articulation of these three registers presents a problem for the phenomenological as well as the
metaphysical approaches. If the subjective experience of time is our fundamental datum, how do we
go about reconnecting it to historical and cosmological time? Can phenomenology avoid
subjectivizing time? The subjectivization of time internalizes it to individual consciousness. Time’s
irreducibility is maintained at the cost of affirming the absolute primacy of subjectivity. This is the
move made by Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger, each in his own way. It only attains full
methodological self-consciousness in Heidegger, for whom existential temporality is the source of
and condition for historical and cosmological (i.e., world) time. Two problems then arise. First, how
can the plurality of subjective times be rendered commensurate within a single, impersonal,
historical time? Second, how can the boundary between personal and impersonal, experiential and
non-experiential, be wholly inscribed within subjective time? We will return to these issues below.
The important thing to note is how metaphysics and phenomenology conspire to sandwich history
between subjective and objective time. It is this “sandwiching” of history that Jameson will
challenge.

Time as Formlessness

Kant lends methodological problem a decisive twist: “Time yields no shape.” 6 For Kant, it is
precisely because it is a form of intuition that time is devoid of conceptual form. In Platonic terms,
time is formlessness as such. The problem of conceptualizing time is that of trying to give form to
formlessness as such. Of course, formlessness as such is a paradoxical notion. Indeed, every attempt
to formalize time is paradoxical. This is why time is the phenomenon that resists conceptual
4 Augustine, Confessions, bk 11, §17, trans. E. B. Pusey (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1950), 287.
5 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 1893-1917, trans. J. Barnett
Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2008); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E.
Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).
6 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 163.

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representation. Does this then mean it can be grasped as pure presentation? Here, it is important to
mark the difference between the Kantian claim that time, as a form of intuition, is a necessary
condition for the representability (i.e., cognizability) of objects and the claim that time is intuited
formlessness. The claim that formlessness, as such, can be directly intuited is the temptation proper
to any philosophy that thinks it can circumvent representation by retrieving the immediacy of time’s
self-presentation in terms of so-called “lived experience.” Bergson is the pre-eminent advocate of
this claim. It requires separating time from space. Space is quantity without quality, repetition
partes extra partes. Time is quality devoid of any unit of measure, and hence quality without
quantity:

In a word, pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes
which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to
externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it
would be pure heterogeneity.7

In Bergson’s account, the heterogeneity of duration cannot be aligned with difference in extensity
(space) because it is sensed, not thought. It consists of sensible, rather than intelligible, differences.
Thus is acategorial. Bergson’s favored example is the unfolding of a melody: any difference in the
duration of any part of the melody alters the quality of the whole because the relation between part
and whole changes unceasingly as a function of the difference between past and present. Thus
difference in quality varies continually as a function of duration and cannot be tied to specifiable
differences between discretely individuated states.

But this qualitative difference must be subjectively registered. To say that duration is “lived”
(vécue) is to say that the subjectivity of duration is one with the subjectivity of sensation. Bergson
wishes to dissociate difference in sensation from differences in the representation of sensation. But
to do this, he must dissociate our ability to discriminate qualitative difference from our ability to
perceive qualities as properties of things—that is to say, enduring substances.

Now, while the ability to discriminate sensory inputs is constitutive of sentience, the capacity to
perceive something as something is a conceptual ability that marks the transit from sentience to
sapience, and the difference between feeling and knowing. In this regard, the distinction between
substance and attribute can be taken to be the reflexive formalization of the pre-reflexive
discrimination between thing and property implicit in our practical comportment. For many
philosophers—Kant and Hegel foremost among them—this conceptualization of sensory
discrimination signals the ascent from sensation to perception, and marks a decisive step forward in
our cognitive evolution. But for Bergson, conceptualization is metaphysically discredited by its
utilitarian origins. The intellect selects, abstracts, and generalizes, but these operations are
determined by the needs of the organism. Experience is perception, but because our perception is
limited, our organs subtract, select, and isolate elements from the flux of sensation:

If the senses and consciousness had an unlimited scope, if in the double direction of matter
and mind the faculty of perceiving was indefinite, one would not need to conceive any more
than to reason. Conceiving is a makeshift when perception is not granted us, and reasoning
is done in order to fill up the gaps of perception or to extend its scope.8

7 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Harper, 1960), 104
8 Henri Bergson, “The Perception of Change,” in The Creative Mind, trans. M. L. Andison (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield
Adams and Co., 1975), 131.

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If conception traduces the metamorphic movement of duration, this is because it is called upon to
supplement the organic limitations of perception. Intellection fixes and abstracts, selects and
subtracts. It arrests the flow of duration, carving it into discrete states to which it attributes
determinate properties. It abstracts generic properties from these determinate states by subtracting
their particular differences. Lastly, it uses these generic properties to establish relations of similarity
and dissimilarity between states in terms of measurable changes in quality.

By way of contrast, Bergsonian intuition nothing but pure perception, without selection or
subtraction. Thus the reality of change can only be intuited, not conceived. But what qualities of
duration does intuition reveal? Since these qualities are not attributable to recognizable things, how
are we to say what they are qualities of? For Bergson, language (and symbolization, more generally)
is precisely the medium of conceptual generality that substitutes the utilitarian representation of
things for the presentation of duration (time) “as such.” The conceptual specification of qualitative
particularity remains constrained by the linguistic structure of categorization. But for Bergson it is
precisely categorization that elides the absolute heterogeneity of duration’s qualitative singularities.
Yet the intentionality of perception—the perception of something as something, as this, not that—
seems to require conceptual mediation.

By purging sensation of the intentionality of conception, Bergson rejects Kant’s intrication of

perception and judgment. Bergson absolutizes the heterogeneity of sensation to such an extent as to
render its correlate indiscernible, since in denying the “of-ness” of sensation, he effectively (and
deliberately) dissolves the distinction between sensing and sensed. But then the question remains:
what is sensed, if any identification of the object of sensation is already its conceptual
sequestration? The fusion of sensing and sensed in intuition is not the perception of sheer
heterogeneity—formlessness, as such—but the substitution of conceptual indeterminacy for the
phenomenon of formlessness. This is to say that Bergson has to use language to communicate
language’s congenital inability to capture the heterogeneity of a duration whose intrinsic features he
can only indicate linguistically, which is to say conceptually. He has to resort to concepts to
describe time’s resistance to conceptual characterization.

From Figuration to Phainesthai

Pace Bergson, time is not self-presenting; it does not show itself directly. There is no absolutely
immediate experience of time as such, unfiltered by concepts, once it is understood that time is
mediation. Mediation is, of course, the fundamental category of dialectical thinking, and to say that
time is mediation is to suggest that to think dialectically is to think temporally: this is Jameson’s
fundamental contribution to the problem of thinking time. But to understand how Jameson
construes time as mediation, we have to understand in what sense he is a self-consciously dialectical
thinker—one who eschews both the metaphysical reification of time and its phenomenological
subjectivization. How can we mark this difference?

Kant taught us to distinguish the formally necessary properties of our representations of things from
the necessary properties of things in themselves. Metaphysics is dogmatic to the extent that it makes
the properties of representations for the properties of things. It assumes that things in themselves
lend themselves to representation. Dialectical thinking proposes to move beyond the dogmatic
representation of the thing itself and the epistemic formalism of Kant’s philosophy. It does so
through the insight that what Kant characterized as the discrepancy between representation and
thing is, in fact, the thing itself. But the thing itself is no longer a self-identical substance; it is rather
a concatenation of differences: something that is not what it is, and is what it is not. Most
importantly, for dialectics, the difference between what the thing is and what we take it to be is

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internal to the thing itself. If time is the ultimate source of differentiation, this means that dialectics
thinks time as both the form and the content of the thing: it lets things appear in time while letting
time show itself in things.

The problem, then, is to understand how time can resist encapsulation within prefabricated concepts
without transcending conceptualization entirely. What is to be resisted is the theological gesture that
would relegate time’s formlessness to the realm of the utterly ineffable or infinitely other. Thus the
challenge is to forge a form appropriate to the phenomenon of time as a new kind of phenomenon,
such that time impregnates the knowing of time. This is to make formlessness appear. But to
phenomenalize formlessness is not to stamp it with the seal of unity. Time is not one. As Jameson
puts it: “Only in the intersection of multiple kinds of temporality can Time itself—if one can speak
of such a thing—be made to appear.”9 The challenge is to think time’s heterogeneity or, better, its
radical inconsistency, without subjectivizing it is such a way that this inconsistency is relativized to
the empirical multiplicity of subjectivities.

Jameson credits Heidegger with a decisive conceptual innovation as far as the thinking of time is
concerned. Time is not a phenomenon, but the phenomenality of the phenomenon; it is not
appearance, but the appearing of appearance, or phainesthai. Time as phainesthai shifts the register
of analysis from the metaphysics of presence to the destruction of traditional ontology that
overturns time’s subordination to presence. But in Heidegger this overturning operates by invoking
another type of transcendence, the transcendence of Dasein, as that being which is in each case
mine. As Heidegger writes in his 1924 lecture The Concept of Time: “What is time became the
question: Who is time? More closely: Are we ourselves time? Or closer still: Am I my time?” 10
Heidegger’s overturning of the metaphysics of presence is carried out in the name of a metaphysics
of propriety or “authenticity” (eigentlichkeit), which Jameson rejects precisely because it reinscribes
the manifold of time, its formlessness, within the form of mineness or propriety. Thus, Jameson
wants to expropriate phainesthai from the hermeneutics of propriety and use it to make
formlessness appear.

This is the problem of figuring time. Figuration is non-representational form. In Time and
Narrative, Paul Ricoeur proposes a hermeneutic alternative to Heidegger’s metaphysics of
propriety, insisting that no pure phenomenology of time is possible.11 For Ricoeur, time’s appearing
is not a datum of intuition (Bergson), nor a resoluteness toward death (Heidegger), but rather the
result of a narrative configuration. Configuration is a form of narrative synthesis: “The configuring
act presiding over emplotment is a judicative act, involving a ‘grasping together’.” 12 This narrative
configuration or “emplotment” has three aspects that Ricoeur appropriates from Aristotle’s Poetics:

• Peripetaia—reversal
• Anagnorisis—recognition
• Pathos—suffering.

Literary narrative exemplifies the configuration of time as the co-imbrication of reversal,

recognition, and suffering in a “dissonant concordance” freed from the implausible resolutions of
teleological synthesis, whether metaphysical or dialectical. Ricoeur’s humanist agenda is clear:
narrative configuration gives shape to time beyond the fetishization of absolute heterogeneity
9 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 500.
10 Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. W. McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 22E.
11 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), 83.
12 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), 61.

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(Bergson), but without reinstating historical teleology (a la Hegel and Marx). The problem for
Jameson is that this configuration of time as “dissonant concordance” replaces the martial
individualism of “being-towards-death” with intersubjective consensus and conciliatory pluralism.
The “emplotment” of dissonance subordinates time to the form of intersubjectivity, which precludes
catastrophic overturning, whose figures are the irreversible, the unrecognizable, and the intolerable.
Yet catastrophe is precisely one of the figures in which history appears as the shattering of
consensus and the violation of the personal by the impersonal. Jameson is quick to affirm the
dialectical corollary, which distinguishes historical materialism from tragic pessimism: history also
appears as liberation, as the emancipation of persons through impersonal institutions:

In the phenomenon that interests us here, the sudden flash of history, we must somehow
account for the evidence that History in that sense can be experience either as a nightmare or
as a sudden opening and possibility that is lived in enthusiasm. It is an alternation which
suggests the existence of some deeper duality in [the] thing itself: the way in which, for
example, the appearing of History, its phainesthai, entails a new opening up of past and
future alike, which can conceivably be marked antithetically: a somber past of violence and
slaughter giving way to a new sense of collective production, or on the contrary a glimpse of
promise in the past which is shut down by a closing of horizons in universal catastrophe.
Better still, both dimensions can be experience at one and the same time in an undecidable
situation in which the reemergence of History is unrelated to its content and dependent
above all on that form in which after a long reduction to the lowered visibility of the present,
past and future once again open up in the full transparency of their distances.13

The indissociability of ruin and accomplishment, defeat and victory, beyond the reversals of
narrative, is but one symptom of a deeper duality in the thing itself, a fission which resists
judicative synthesis and exceeds narrative configuration, but reveals History as a totalization-in-
process. This is a realization that Jameson attributes to Sartre: History itself only appears within
history: “it is only on the occasion of certain of its events that History can be grasped as an Event in
its own right.”14 Thus History is neither an all-encompassing continuity nor a punctual interruption,
but the interpenetration of the two. More importantly for Jameson, it is not consciousness or
narrative whose synthesizing acts make History appear. The synthesizing power that gives form to
formless multiplicity of temporalities, drawing them inexorably into its orbit, is not subjectivity, but
Capital as the motor of globalization. Capital is the totalization-in-process of History as synthesis of
subjective and objective time.

This allows Jameson to rearticulate our initial triad: subjective time, historical time, objective time.
Jameson counters Ricoeur’s idealist phainesthai with a materialist alternative in which it is the
capitalist mode of production that makes both time and history appear. In our initial triad, historical
time was sandwiched between subjectivity and objectivity such that the philosophy of history pitted
metaphysicians, who subordinate historical change to natural becoming, against phenomenologists,
who subordinate collective transformation to existential conversion. Jameson’s great insight is that
the difference between time and history must be made to appear within each term of the distinction.
To think the difference between time and history is to historicize time and to temporalize history.
History becomes the mediation-in-process through which both subjectivization and objectivization
become possible. It mediates the transition from the pre-existential to the experiential, from
objectivity to subjectivity, just as it mediates the eruption of the impersonal into the personal, and
the reinsertion of the personal within the impersonal:

13 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 598.

14 Ibid., 592.

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 Subjective time

History (totalization-in-process)

Objective Time

However, as a Marxist, Jameson cannot remain content with identifying Capital as the motor of
historical totalization. Capital is not the pilot of universal history, even if it is its engine. Because
History is a totalization-in-process rather than an achieved totality, it is necessarily incomplete.
Thus it implies its own other, both as what it is not and what it has never been. What is not and has
never been is the reservoir of formlessness from which every figuration of time is drawn, but a
formlessness devoid of potentiality since potentiality is already endowed with conceptual form.
What is not, nor has ever been, is nowhere and nowhen. It is Utopia as the “absolute negation of
that fully realized Absolute which our own system has attained.” 15 Utopia can only be figured as the
absolute other of systemic totality and totalizing even, substance, and subject: “the alternate world
contiguous with ours, but without any connection or access to it.” 16 This alternate world is already
actual, rather than merely possible, yet its causal disconnection from ours renders it inaccessible.
And in a justly famous passage, Jameson concludes: “Then from time to time, like a diseased
eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived, or like those baroque sunbursts in which
rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that
other systems, other spaces, are still possible.”17

Actualizing The Impossible

Three things are worthy of note here. First, Utopia, Jameson argues, “is not a representation, but an
operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond
which we do not seem able to go in imagining changes in our own society and world (except in the
direction of dystopia and catastrophe.” 18 Utopia can only be figured as the impossibility of what is
currently representable, conceivable, or imaginable. But this impossibility is actual, says Jameson.
Thus Jameson subjects Heidegger’s ontologization of possibility as finite transcendence to a
dialectical reversal: it is now the “existence,” i.e., the nonobjective actuality of Utopia as conceptual
impossibility that is the condition of (historical) possibility as such.

Second, actuality is indexically defined: the actual world is just this world, the spatiotemporal
continuum we collectively inhabit that is cognitively accessible to us. But other worlds, although
cognitively inaccessible to us, are equally actual; that are just not ours. In a probably unintended
echo of David Lewis, Jameson recodes the actual/possible distinction as an epistemological
difference, rather than an ontological difference. It is not a difference in being, but a difference in
knowing.19 More specifically, it is the difference between the conceivable and the inconceivable,
which here stands as a cipher for the difference between the knowable and the unknowable. But if

15 Ibid., 612.
16 Ibid., 612.
17 Ibid., 612.
18 Ibid., 413.
19 “Our actual world is only one world among others. We call it alone actual not because it differs in kind from all the
rest, but because it is the world we inhabit. The inhabitant of other worlds may truly call their own worlds actual, if
they mean by ‘actual’ what we do; for the meaning we give to ‘actual’ is such that it refers at any world to that
world itself. ‘Actual’ is indexical, like ‘I’, or ‘here’, or ‘now’: it depends for its reference on the circumstances of
utterance, to wit the world where the utterance is located.” David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1973), 85-86.

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this impossibility merely marked the crack or fissure in what is currently conceivable, if it merely
figured the impossibility proper to our system, it would remain a second-order representation: the
representation of the unrepresentable. From a dialectical point of view, the crack or fissure must
acquire a positive valence within our current conceptual system. What prevents the unrepresentable
from becoming hypostatized as a transcendent thing is the very act of conceiving it as a fissure for
us, which condenses into an obligation for us to do something. This condensation proceeds through
the work of conceiving the inconceivable; an effort that turns it into a reason for the practical
transformation of what is.

This brings us to our third and final point. It is the causal disconnection between contiguous actual
worlds that renders them mutually inaccessible. But the evocation of “flashes of light” registering in
a “diseased” and presumably unseeing eye seems to imply some sort of transmissibility across
disconnected worlds. Is this transmission due to some unknown kind of causation? Is transit across
worlds a matter of forging new kinds of causal connection, both in theory and practice? And if so,
does this entail that “possibility” is to be understood in terms of these new forms of causal
interaction across spatiotemporally disjointed systems?