Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative

Afterword: Representing Jameson

205 Afterword: Representing Jameson I opened this book with a claim that Jameson advances in Marxism and Form concerning the “peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing,” which, he maintains, lies “in its holistic, ‘totalizing’ character: as though you could not say any one thing until you had first said everything; as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system.”1 While I stressed earlier the problems this characterization of dialectical writing creates for readers of Jameson’s work, it brings up another set of concerns in trying to bring my own study of that work to a close: how does one conclude a portrait, one with holistic or totalizing aspirations of its own, of an intellectual project that is itself very much an ongoing proposition? One of the immense pleasures of reading Jameson’s work in the present is that his scholarly productivity continues on unabated, and major studies, including the first three volumes of The Poetics of Social Forms, are already well under way. This concern came home to me the very week I completed the first full draft of this manuscript, as another significant and original work by Jameson then appeared, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (2011). On the one hand, this slim volume, along with its immediate predecessor The Hegel Variations, fulfills the promise made in the conclusion of the opening section of the already monumental but also “unfinished” Valences of the Dialectic: “To be sure, Valences is something of a Hamlet without the prince, insofar as it lacks the central chapter on Marx and his dialectic which was to have been expected. Two complementary volumes, commentaries on Hegel’s Phenomenology and Marx’s Capital (volume 1), respectively, will therefore complete the project.”2 In good dialectical fashion, such a “completion” necessarily changes in some significant ways how we should read not only Valences of the Dialectic but also Jameson’s entire project as it has developed up to this moment. For example, with the appearance of this pair of volumes— unique in their own right in Jameson’s oeuvre in that they are his first books dedicated to a close reading of a single text—we might now glimpse the larger plan of Valences of the Dialectic, wherein the opening section, “The Three Names of the Dialectic,” is to be followed by three dialectical “specifications” (to use Karl Korsch’s term that Jameson invokes in the later pages of Representing Capital), those at work, respectively , in Hegel’s Phenomenology and Encyclopedia Logic (the topic of Valences’ second chapter, “Hegel and Reification”), and Marx’s first volume of Capital.3 Crucially, however, in no way should Capital be taken as the telos, or the moment of synthesis, in this three-part schema. In both The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital, Jameson confronts head on “one of the most notorious and inveterate stereotypes” of not only Hegel’s work but also of dialectical thinking more generally,“namely the thesisantithesis -synthesis formula.”4 Such a conceptual reification, on occasion encouraged by even Hegel himself, is, Jameson points out,“instructively undercut by Hegel’s addition of a fourth term in the greater Logic, which now replaces ‘synthesis’ with another old friend, ‘the negation of the negation.’ The latter, officially inscribed in their dialectical philosophy by Engels and then Stalin, and attracting about as much opprobrium as ‘base and superstructure,’ is in reality a formal and future-oriented move, which, unlike the regressive idea of a ‘synthesis’ or return to the original qualities, leaves the nature of the latter open.”5 This is the same operation that is given such a brilliant figuration, as we saw in the interlude , in Jameson’s later deployments of Greimas’s semiotic square. Moreover, even the tripartite formula, if understood itself as a figure, “can suggest the all-important unity of opposites by way of its first two terms, and provided we abandon the obsessive search for syntheses.”6 Similarly, “the form of the syllogism,” which Jameson locates as the origin of the tripartite schema, “can also be useful if we focus attention not on its results or conclusions, but rather on that ‘middle term’ shared by both subject and predicate.”7 The latter is the approach Jameson takes 206 ❘ Afterword in Valences of the Dialectic to the particular dialectic of Hegel’s Logic, locating it as the mediating link between the Phenomenology and Capital :“Hegel’s...