These are for the most part simple, unelaborated reading notes. I realize that in places I may have put down unnecessary details rather than following through the argument, because a lack of acquaintance with the former made the latter opaque for me. Even then, I'm not sure that recreating the argument in note form is even possible, given the complexity and self-professed dialectical nature of the work, the sometimes unfamiliar philosophical discussions and the intentional non-systematization of the methodology(s) it elaborates. I definitely want to come back to this book at some point, and hopefully these notes will successfully be able to refamiliarize me with it when I return, even if they are hardly adequate or scarcely can be said to capture what is greatest and most interesting about it.
There is a distinction between the German and French dialectical thought traditions. Dialectics has long been one of the official philosophical traditions in Germany. In Hegel and in the author's Jameson deals with, dialectical thought "turns out to be nothing more or less than" (reducible to?) the elaboration of dialectical sentences. In this sense dialectical thought seems to foreground the question of style.
Indeed, Jameson defends briefly the style of the German dialectical writers he surveys in the book. True thought cannot be entirely captured by simple, straightforward prose. Only dialectical writing, directing the temporal movement of thought, allowing the reader to immerse themselves in the materiality of the author's language, can express the 'imperative' to surpass empiricist myopia over into meaning.
The French dialectical tradition is more concrete. Dialectical thought there has had to express itself throguh a more subterranean influence on other traditions.
Whereas it may be said to have sufficed that earlier Marxist criticism, 'genetic,' could emphasize capitalism's historical evolution from feudal and tribal systems, an operationto a great extent permitted by the transparent continuity of the past with the present and of public with private life, today in the United States ideological mystifications are much greater and the simple task of highlighting alternative past forms of artistic production is not enough.
Adorno's critique of modern culture is inseparable from his manifold capacities. His own fields of study exist in the realm of culture, in the superstructure.
Jameson begins by sketching the form of the sociology of culture: as the shifting between two poles, the leaping between one and the other, in infra- and superstructure, as two unequal and incommensurate terms. Specific relations of causality, reflection, manifestation, resolution, etc., come after the fact, with the simple posing of a fact against its ground being principle.
This kind of dialectical thinking mixes two independent systems and incommensurable realities. An example Jameson employs from Adorno is an explanation of aspect of the Viennese intellectual in terms of Viennese concrete history. This is understood as a trope, less as a completely original philosophical explanation of the phenomenon, a figure or stylization through which the dialectical apprehension of both kinds of realities at once is expressed. What is felt here is like what is later called by Jameson the feeling of necessity: having grasped the meaning of history, the relation of all these different terms and sequences, we can see how the particular cultural fact cannot have been any other way, rendering contingency incomprehensible.
Adorno's example, being as it was a footnote, was a rather instantaneous realization, generates only a static model. Thus the 'full-scale study of superstructures, the construction of the historical trope' requires a surpassing of the single, infinitesimal, 'atomistic,' term, to its history, and the comparison of this to its background, generating analogy, where the terminology of the one sequence can be successfully imposed on the other.
In this way, the cultural may serve as a kind of preparation for the economic, thus as its own way of comprehending the real and the concrete, a propaedeutic. A complete demonstration of such models would need material to be furnished from 'spheres as distant from everyday life as possible.' For the more proximate and representational spheres of literature and philosophy obscure things, their content getting in the way of the formal and methodological points to be made.
The active study of superstructures entails the juxtaposition of a cultural term's history against its background, 'causality' being disposed of in favor of, and passing over into, analogy. Such an analogy has to be formal (warum noch?). And so the material to be furnished for such a vision must come from disparate spheres of cultural production, so that the content does not interfere in the formal demonstration.*
A nice quote
It is, however, one of the most basic lessons of dialectical method that the potentialities for development of a given mode of thought lie predetermined and, as it were, foreordained within the very structure of the initial terms themselves, and reflect the characteristics of its point of departure.
Hegel is able to overcome the separation between subject and object by finding his standing point in a moment where that separation has not yet taken place . . . where the subject [is] still at one with its object.
The dialectical method is precisely this pereference for the conrete totality over the separate, abstract parts.
But this totality cannot be understood only as an external thing, but is something in which we are included. Thus dialectical thinking, inasmuch as it apprehends not only what is external to us, must think its own thought, a thought "in which the mind must deal with its own thought process just as much as with the material it works on, in which both the particular content involved and the style of thinking suited to it must be held together in the mind at the same time."
The impossibility of the Hegelian system [vision of totality] is not a proof of its intellectual limitations, its cumbersome methods and theological superstructure; on the contrary, it is a judgment on us and on the moment of history in which we live, and in which such a vision of the totality of things is no longer possible.
The organizing concept of Absolute Spirit was a mirage resulting from the "transitional indeterminacy" through which Hegel lived. The reconciliation he made in his thought was only latent in the objects studies in the Phenomenology. A proper geistige reconciliation is conditional upon a social revolution reconciling the individual with his social reality.
I genuinely have to reread this chapter; I was confused and I don't think my notes to any justice to it. Having gotten more play with the book's themes as developed in later chapters I think this one will make more sense on a reread.
Jameson argues for a fundamental continuity in Lukács' work, from Theory of the Novel, through History and Class Consciousness, and to his later work.
A crucial opposition in Lukács' TotN is that between essence (meaning) and life (raw material), a particular manifestation of the Hegelian one between the abstract and the concrete. Along this line he sketches a framework which he later uses in his discussion of the novel. The epic has meaning immanent to life. In tragedy, essence and life come apart and into conflict escept in the tragic crisis. Platonic philosophy is the complete separation of the two.
The main idea of TotN is that the novel is the attempt to return to that reconciliation of life and essence of the epic, in the conditions of the epic's impossibility. For this reason the novel is always being reinvented, is the very search for the possiblity of narration, defined by the opposition of man to his setting, inasmuch as this is precisely that which the novel is confronting. Throughout TotN man's 'setting' shifts from nature to society (this is the historicization of [sometimes one's own] past concepts that Jameson describes everywhere in the book; I forget what the exact implications of this shift are.)*
. . .
In HaCC, Lukács means by class consciousness "the a priori limits or advantages conferred by affiliation with the bourgeoisie or the proletariat upon the mind's capacity to understand reality." His problem with bourgeois philosophy is principally with its form, not the content per se. Lukács shows in philosophy what Marx did in economic theory: not the falsity of every detail of prior theory, but the effect of the economist's class position upon their fearful refusal to theorize the totality of the field and all the conclusions which would follow. For the effect of class consciousness upon thinking has less to do with individual facts and details than with their form of organization and interpretation thereof.
Kant's doctrine of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself comes from the middle class instinctual attitude to engage with external objects solely in the form of idle contemplation, rather than of using them, inasmuch as the bourgeois only see these commodities as final products. The proletariat, the producers of the products who feel themselves objectified and alienated, come tot higher, dynamic, self-consciousness.
Sartre is really setting the ontological foundations for historical materialism. His Critique of Dialectical Reason historicizes and concretizes much of his earlier Being and Nothingness, moving away from perhaps 'metaphysical' constructions toward historical relations.
Notably, Sartre did not find Marxist after existentialism, having studied Capital two years before Heidegger's Being and Time was published. For Sartre, existentialism and Marxism never came into conflict because they both dealt with completely different objects. This explanation, it seems to me, is not really not sufficient later on, where, in the Critique, he historicizes his existential categories and uses them to base historical materialism: here he must profess a necessary relationship, even dependence of one upon the other, not just a parallelism.
In Search for a Method Sartre opposes a vulgar Marxist kind of analysis to a more concrete one. The example of the judgment of Paul Valéry is used.
A vulgar Marxist analysis would simply call him a petit bourgeois, as an abstract and historically non-specific category. If this category is to be historical and specific, then it should include within it the concrete experiences of members of the petite bourgeoisie such as Valéry himself. So this kind of judgment must be done in a different way, and it is this situation that Sartre hopes to rectify by three operations: his method will place a lived link between existence and abstract idea; a replacing of these things back to history with a renewed emphasis on temporality, a concern for 'overlap and time lag,' generational succession and entities of different time schemes; putting in place of a static logical relation of idea (e.g. class affiliation) to existence (e.g. a bourgeois) a dynamic one, consisting less of determinism and more of reaction to existing circumstances.
The Vth part of the chapter examines largely the relation of Sart to Marxist orthodoxy. It is for the most part a difference in the emphases. The Marxist model of history is more diachronic, while the Sartrean is more synchronic, which is why it can accept the Marxist one as a valid ordering of history, while itself offering a more cyclical vision of lived history, the former with its (relatively) autonomous and self-contradictory development through economic institutions, and evaluating any moment according to its position along capitalism's development over a period, the latter resolving any moment back into lived class struggle.
Sartre tries to substitute for Engels' primacy of economic with that of praxis and class struggle. By doing so Sartre can be compared to Marx with his renunciation of philosophy, which is less an attempt at proclaiming philosophy inherently idealistic and at replacement with materialism or with Marxist social science, than it was a shot at speecialized disciplines of knowledge itself, trying to restore it to its concrete unity; which concreteness came in the form of history or the economic. By the time we get to Sartre, the economic, in the form of economic science, has itself become an abstract mode of specialization, which forces a return to the concrete of history, involving a limited attack on economics.
The two tendencies were already existent within Marxist, two codes in which to speak of history. The subjective code is that of class struggle, the objective that of the development of economic modes of production out of their own internal contradictions. Class is a transitional category. The Critique can be said to take up the basic subject matter of Capital, 'the entire complex of reified relationships' in terms of human relations, preferring the subjective code.
Dialectical thinking, inasmuch as it involes reversals, as it involves relationships between elements that shift in response to a single element shifting, implies diachrony.
The choice of the categories of which to observe the very reversals, to place in such a diachronic model, in short we\hich to watch in parallel — this choice is a crucial and necessary part of any dialectical criticism.
But the 'dialectical articulation of a phenomenon into a certain ratio of forces or categories' only makes one conscious of the possibility of other arrangements or dispositions thereof. It is the possibility these different arrangements themselves that constitute diachrony.
Such abstract models, even when relatively historical as opposed to the Hegelian ideal kind, come to acknowledge themselves as abstractions from reality, since it only studies a kind of cross-section of the latter; sensing this, the abstract Hegelian model redissolves into concrete history, where a MArxist model takes hold. The latter happens when we finally realize that the superstructure can have no history, that there is onmly history of people's concrete relations to each other.
The diachronic can be restated in terms of form and content (not the classic form-matter opposition), for content is the new, seeking a new form adequate to it, abolishing the older form. Marx's great innovation is to have transferred this idea of Hegel's to the realm of concrete history. The form is indeed the realization of the content's own logic, inasmuch as the social raw material of art of philosophy is already pre-formed content, already meaningful. 'Form is itself but the working out of content in the realm of the superstructure.' Adequation of content to form is one of the most crucial indices of its degree of historical realization.
This is one mode of reconciliation of the internal and external, transcending the typical formalism-historicism opposition.
Dialectical criticism cannot come at a work already set imposing a certain set of categories onto it, since its content already generates its own categories to use, its own terms in which to judge and interpret it. So dialectical thinking is historical to two degrees: not only are its objects historical (economies, composition, representation) but so also are its concepts (agriculture and capitalism, style and rhetoric, symbolism. It also, where its stresses the coordination of different elements, not only emphasizes the pecularity of the categories use to apprehend these, but relates the strength and overdevelopment in one element to weaknesses and deficiencies elsewhere, this dynamic itself being part of the trope of the dialectical reversal.
In so far as dialectical thought is self-consciousness, Hegelian and Marxist dialectics can be distinguished by the kind and degree of self-consciousness; the Hegelian being a logical sense of interrelationship, the Marxist moving past this intellectual self-consciousness towards understanding one's own position in society and how this limits his thought.
Dialectical thought stresses the identity of subjeect and object. Whereas non-dialectical thought initially separates a subjectivity from the object imagined to be worked upon, dialectical thought abolishes this dualism, not only by realizing that thought itself is the creator of this dualism, but also that it is conditioned and dependent on its content.
Explanation is inherent in description. Understanding of history (its meaning) has nothing to do with the incarnation of laws or manifestations of models, but with a sufficienty detailed and enlarged description of the event, turning its parts into cause and effect, problem and explanation. Understanding is a temporal form, always at risk of becoming tautology.
For to connect the Gironde's social experience in order to explain their actions renders them comprehensible, but to relate the one to the other as cause and its effect is generally incoherent when made so literally, the former only possibly functioning as explanation if its were to belie various false and bizarre notions of the Gironde's social experience, but in this function it is tautological. Thus tautology serves to replace the illusion of causality. Similarly, since dialectical thought overcomes and finds illicit that strict opposition of the intrinsic and extrinsic, it will not tolerate external social reality causing a certain kind of thought, but only its setting internal limits on it.
History may be said to be distinguished by what Jameson calls its 'indeterminacy of distance.' Historical understanding is a matter, on the one hand, of specification, stronger detailing and bringing into focus of an event, and on the other, of zooming out, putting it back into its relationship to other events. Thus 'historical truth, as opposed to historical accuracy,' is a matter of constant rectification or negation.
The notion of historical necessity the feeling accompanying the coming to historical understanding, is a trope of figure of the process of historical understanding, not as much a concept. Necessity is thus only felt post festum.
Marxism is essentially critical, situational, not systematic not precisely predictive. Thus dialectical materialism is not a single, entirely coherent, doctrine, but a dynamic mode of thought which can be called upon to attack mechanistic realism or idealism is it seen fit, varying its emphases according to the moments' exigencies, not a coherent position in itself, but a constant correction and rectification of other positions.
Vulgar Marxist literary criticism evokes economic history as an abstract diachronic construct (everything applying to this that was said of Hegelian sequences earlier in the chapter). Marxist literary criticism really distinguishes itself from the sociological sort on the synchronic level, where the economic does not simplu determine the work, but where the work is a definite and limited sort of reaction to the base, thus proving itself later to be genuinely diachronic.
For Marxism does not only use the economic as a preferred description or analogy, but the passage from, e.g., the literary to the economic is the movement from specialized knowledge to the concrete.
Every cultural artifact must be udnerstood as a weapon in class struggle, thus differentially, as promoting one class over another. This promotion is simultaneously a discrediting of the opposition. The artifact, art piece, philosophical system, is not only 'affiliated' with a class, but has a 'functional role.'
'We may therefore say that what distinguishes the Marxist from the sociological notion of class is that, for the former, class is precisely a differential concept, that each class is at once a way of relating to and of refusing the other.'
[T]he work of art or the cultural artifact certainly reflects something, but what it reflects is not so much the class itself as some autonomous cultural configuration, as rather the situation of that class, or, in short, class conflict.
*Section needs elaborating.