Krisen, del 83: Anteckningar kring Jameson

what are the potentially political forms in which this post-historical situation might be experienced historically? /…/
what is the genre in which the historical in this paradoxical post-historical sense can be made to appear?

Ytterst brännande frågor! Detta är vad Fredric Jameson söker svar på i sin bok Valences of the dialectic, skriver Gopal Balakrishnan i sin bitvis intressanta recension som betitlats “The coming contradiction“. Jag lär aldrig orka läsa boken, för även om jag uppskattar Jamesons skarpsinne har jag svårt att smälta hans litteraturhistoriska utflykter.
Här kommer några läsanteckningar till recensionen, som är ordrik nog. Dock kompletterar med några ögonkast in i den sexhundrasidiga Valences of the dialectic. Som vanligt i denna serie testar vi att läsa all teori som kristeori. Om postmoderniteten är kris, blir det föga meningsfullt att vara för eller mot det postmoderna utan frågan blir hur detta kristillstånd kan upplevas historiskt.

I slutändan avfärdar Jameson tragedin som svar på frågan, men det är ett mycket försiktigt avfärdande. Tragedin riskerar att leda till en “flykt bakåt, i riktning mot den mänskliga historiens första begynnelser”. Thukydides skildrade det utdragna kriget mellan Sparta och Athen som ett skeende. Eftervärlden har betraktat honom som historiografisk pionjär just för att han bortom de myllrande detaljerna identifierade ett moment av nödvändighet. Historien enhetliggjordes hos Thukydides med hjälp av det tragiska begreppet öde. Jameson skriver:

This conception of historicity as necessity must still be ours, however much it must be grasped in terms of oppositions not yet available to the Greek historian, such as the potential or exhaustion of modes of production. But it would be wrong to assume that our own relationship to such oppositions — yesterday the contradiction between determinism and freedom, tomorrow that between conspiracy and Utopia — is any less mired in ideology than those of earlier moments of human history. The only advantage we have over the historians of the past is that of the comparative enlargement of our own history as it approaches a truly global one.

Svaret är inte tragedi utan dialektik, menar Jameson. Ändå ser han en poäng i att damma av själva byggstenarna i den antika tragedin, så som den teoretiserades av Aristoteles (för att senare återteoretiseras av Ricœur). Jamesons motiv verkar handla om att söka sig bort från den moderna romanformen, med dess individualism och dess protagonist/antagonist-dramaturgi, som inte är i stånd att förmedla det historiska i vår tid. Alternativet söks via tre aristoteliska begrepp: peripeteia, anagnorisis och pathos.

Peripeteia, vändpunkten eller omkastningen, manifesterar en enhet av seger och nederlag. Här finns en klar parallell till Marx framställning av kapitalismen som samtidigt den sämsta och den bästa situation som drabbat mänskligheten, liksom till den kristeori där kapitalismens globala triumf är identisk med dess globala kollaps. Långt citat ur Balakrishnans recension:

In a brilliant, contemporary re-reading of Marx’s Capital, Jameson claims that the ultimate point of this work was to demonstrate how a society organized around a process of value-creating labour eventually staggers into a condition of permanent mass un- and under-employment, spawning an ever deeper underworld of surplus humanity /…/
While later Marxists would ignore this side of his work, Marx himself placed the demographic preconditions of capitalism at the centre of his critique of political economy. In volume 1 of Capital, he argued that the process of the accumulation of surplus value undermined its own conditions of expansion through its tendency to replace labour-power with capital—generating over the long term an irreversible decline in the demand for labour. Marx presented the outline of a trend unfolding out from a structuring contradiction in the value form, manifesting itself in an erratic interplay of tendencies and counter-tendencies: ‘Such a self-destructive contradiction cannot be in any way even enunciated or formulated as a law’—a proposition, Jameson asserts, ‘which cuts to the very heart of all representation and all philosophical systems’. /…/
It is this contradiction that is un-representable in the terms of ordinary experience: it does not seem to make sense that a society in which almost everyone is compelled to make a living by creating value for the market continually ends up with less available employment, stagnant wages and ever deeper in debt, when everyone knows that this is the only rational way that an economy can be organized. /…/
The inability of this system to reemploy the workforces it is in the protracted process of shedding is also undercutting the power of these populations to respond collectively to and therefore experience this self-destructive contradiction as a coherent historical process.
/…/
The protracted structural crisis of capitalism, ‘the growth of the slum city, of permanent obsolescence, of overpopulation in other words’, is a change /…/ giving rise to the emergence of the demographic sublime as a figuration of extinction or utopia.

Jameson har förblivit skeptisk till idén om att kapitalismen skulle hittat en ny dynamik, grundat i nya typer av “arbete” som skapar värde utan att vara avlönat. Han talar snarare om en “universell stagnation” som har drivit kapitalet på flykt framåt, in i finansialisering eller fiktionalisering.

Dialektik är ett skitord, alltså i största allmänhet. Men det finns undantag då det är helt oersättligt. Nu måste vi åter citera vad Gopal Balakrishnan skriver om Fredric Jameson, för här görs en viktig distinktion mot vad dialektik har betytt inom den breda fårans marxism:

the dialectic emerges as the name for the various ways in which we can think and experience what our categories seem to place out of reach, but which sometimes appear back to us in the form of obscure objects of contradictory predication. /…/
In the broadest sense in which Jameson uses the term, dialectics then is a form of thought that accords a privileged significance to situations in which the logical pattern of our accounts of the world generate aporias, antinomies and, finally, outright contradictions. The Aristotelian axiom of non-contradiction articulates the fundamental premise of self-sameness in the ordinary experience of what is, as encountered in particular experiential contexts according to particular directions of concern. /…/
the flaws in a given category—the way in which it comes to be entangled, for example, in a manifestly unsatisfying dualism or definitional circularity—are already indices of a concrete historical situation. As Lukács once observed, Hegel’s transformation of categorical problems into historical ones opened the way to Marxism. Of course, this conception of the passage from Hegel to Marx would seem immediately to exclude the understanding of dialectics popularized by Friedrich Engels: a monistic vision of a human history unfolding within a boundless, conflict-driven flux of nature. The latter view posited an unproblematic identity of thought and being, as if our forms of thought merely reflect, in more or less adequate ways, reality’s iron laws of antagonistic development. Beginning with Lukács, Western Marxism recoiled from this conception of materialism, of thought as the mirror of nature, by insisting on the non-identity, the rift between categories and being, and the structural transformations that would be needed to bring about some form of their reconciliation.
/…/
If deconstruction and the dialectic are both ways of staging the structural incoherence of would-be foundational claims and definitions, ‘the dialectic pauses, waiting for a new solution to freeze over and become an idea and ideology to which the dialectic can then again be applied, while deconstruction races forward to unravel the new result as well’.