Category Archives: capitalism

The Voluntary (Happy) Submission of Collecting. Notes on The Collector [Koleksiyoncu] (2002) by Pelin Esmer

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Pelin Esmer’s documentary The Collector [Koleksiyoncu] (2002) follows an individual with a very particular pastime through the busy streets of Istanbul. The main character and narrator, an old man whose name is never revealed, is a collector of all kinds of objects. Shake powered flashlights, newspapers, rosaries, stickers from fruits, lists of the names of dead friends, glasses, fish bones, magazines, books, miniature kitchen utensils, among many, are some of the objects that the collector hosts in his apartment. While the house of the Collector could be easily associated with a hoarding disorder, the documentary does not focus entirely in the malaise of collecting objects, but rather in the unexpected happiness of gathering and piling objects.

“My interest in the collectable objects goes back to my childhood. Whenever I saw something small or interesting, I would keep it. For example, when my father bought lots of tomatoes for my mom to make tomato paste, I would choose the nice and small ones and hide them in a drawer. Soon they would rot and my mom would get very angry at me. As I grew older, this interest got wider and wider…” says the main character and narrator of the documentary, and so does the poster that promotions the documentary. While tomatoes go bad after being kept, the objects that the mature collector keeps in his apartment are all things whose damage, or malaise, comes from the space they use. As the Collector acknowledges, he only keeps things that won’t damage other things. The piling of objects day by day grows and it is harder to live or move in the apartment. With the hope of finding a place for all his precious newspapers, the main character finds a university who might receive them all without having to recycle them or dispose them. The Collector does not recycle, does not throw away, does not forget any object, does not lend any piece, he sometimes gives away what he has, but besides he keeps his collection as if he were nurturing a son, so says the Collector himself. 

The noise and vividness of the streets of Istanbul don’t stop. As the Collector wanders the camera follows him to all kind of markets, bazars, corner stores, restaurants, coffeehouses. Everyone buys, everyone consumes. In a way, the Collector is like any other consumer, he buys what he thinks he wants and tries to outsmart the market by buying always in pairs: one for the collection and one to use. Collecting becomes more than piling objects but less than archiving. “To be honest, I cannot claim that this is the aim behind my collections, being a bridge between yesterday and tomorrow is not the overriding idea for me. I see collections as a hobby not as a mission” (41:30). It is not a work, and yet occupies the Collector’s day completely. It is a hobby that looks like a job. 

Collecting, in a way, is an addiction, as put it by the old man himself, “Making collection is a sickness without a cure.” Like an addict, the one who collects is also like a slave. “We can call this a ‘voluntary submission’, or even a ‘mandatory submission’” says again the old man. His duty consists in keeping things in a safe place, things that, like the newspapers, will paradoxically sabotage the very basis of his daily life in his apartment. At the same time, says the old man “the worst thing is, I don’t really feel like fighting against it. I know it is necessary, I need to find a solution but, I just let it take its course” (42:35). 

What would happen with the collections after the Collector’s death? If the objects kept would find a way, ideally, they’ll be the trace of a particular existence. However, it seems the opposite. All that could happen to the collections after their keeper’s death is beyond the keeper’s power. “Collections are a way of clinging to life” says the old man in the final sequence of the documentary. If collecting was the mean that allowed existence to cling itself to life, then without collections life would be like the empty house of the Collector, as he imagines it, “a very dull place.” Without objects, life loses its liveliness. Without collections, where would liveliness find its colours? Without addiction how would existence cling to life and the other way around?

Notes on Infrapolitical Passages. Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State (2021) by Gareth Williams

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In spite of one of the comments at the back of Gareth Williams’ Infrapolitical Passages. Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State (2021) that praises William’s ability for “announcing problems”, after reading the book one sees that Infrapolitical Passages doesn’t really announce anything. That is, the problems that the book “announces” are already lost causes. And more than an announcing, at the end of the book, after we’ve witnessed one of the most accurate, pessimistic and well explained analysis of our current times of crisis, we read about the “advent of the infrapolitical decision of existence” (190). 

Divided in two parts, the book’s main task is to clear the surface of knowledge so that an infrapolitical register may resound. How is it that things ended up like this? Whatever could have happened? These are some of the questions that the book suggests. The thing is that the book is not very interested in knowing why things are how they are, but rather to know how one should confront the uncanniness of our times. This logic is then, as Williams writes following Alberto Moreiras, that the infrapolitical seeks not to “fantazise about the possibility of freeing oneself from nihilism but to confront the consequences of actively skimming over nihilism in the name of a transcendent, messianic counterpolitics” (22). As a result, the first part of the book is the deep analysis on why most (if not all) of contemporary thought self congratulates in the search for palliative solutions while embracing an unfavorable messianic counterpolitics. In response to all the failures of both the right and the left, Williams bets on “what remains unaccounted for, and what the tradition has concealed”, this is the register of infrapolitics, the writing, or trace, that “regulatory representation cannot capture or domesticate” (95). If all politics have attempted to surrender existence, the truth is that existence always presupposes and exceeds politics. At the same time, the problems yet to analyze are not only those of the world of techne but of the uncanny register of everyday existence in times of post- katechon, decontainment and narco-accumulation. 

These three terms are fully engaged in the second part of the book. If the katechon was (is) the figure that decides, the sovereign, today we have already past the “heyday” of politics of decision (if there ever were). Today we have a general state of decointanment, which is not the contraposition between polemos and stasis but the “becoming other” of stasis, the bipartition of a process of “glocal” civil war. Finally narco-accumulation would be the process that instals commodification in anything at a nihilo level. That is, death becomes a business as much as it is drug smuggling, money laundry, corporate capital and so on. Narco-accumulation is what goes hand in hand with the exhaustion of monetary capital (currency) that switches to crypto-currency capital, wealth that extracts the immediate plus-value of existence. No art, no culture, no theory, in brief no subjectivity can save us, “for in the face of death it is always too late for more subjectivity” (162). Or another way to put it, there is no time anymore to look for one’s face at the void of the abyss. 

The pessimistic reality that Williams depicts should be taken as it is. It is now the time where the void resonates, and “this nihil cannot be grasped, restrained, and administered into inexistence by a modern sovereign state form or by the contemporary market-state duopoly that displaces it, since the latter is no longer interested in the fabrication of functional sutures between state and population but in their perennial splitting, differentiation, and positing as subjects and objects” (166). In decointainment there is no “restrainer” and therefore there is no place for mourning, nor for existence, just a flux of infrapower. In the face of all this there is no other option, Williams suggests, but a radical difference, a step back. What is needed, then, are steps back out of diegesis, like the ones Williams analyzes à propos the film La jaula de oro (2013). Away from metaphysics, infrapolitics seeks care, facticity and world (the way we encounter the world everyday [172]). Away from narco-accumulation it becomes evident that “the infrapolitical turn to existence is the a-principal care for the freedom and worldhood whose wherefrom, out of which, and on the basis of which is the ownlessness that underlines being-with itself” (188). That is, infrapolitics would be the common ground of a fugitive thought that shelters existence when all other spheres are desperately hunting it. Being with is the mode of infrapolitics. After this, “perhaps […] it is still not too late for the advent of the infrapolitical decision of existence” (190), but as in The Other Side of Popular (2002), all of this is only a possibility, a perhaps. 

La medición y los cuerpos. Algunas notas sobre las Cartas de relación (1526-1534) de Hernán Cortés

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*las notas son sobre la edición de Mario Hernández Sánchez-Barba de 1985.

“[…]y porque en este libro están agregadas y juntas todas o la mayor parte de las escrituras y relaciones de lo que al señor don Hernando Cortés, Gobernador y Capitán General de la Nueva España, ha sucedido en la conquista de aquellas tierras, por tanto acordé de poner aquí en el principio de todas ellas, el origen de cómo y cuándo y en qué manera el dicho señor gobernador comenzó a conquistar la dicha Nueva España, que es en la manera siguiente […]” (41). Así es como Hernán Cortés abre sus cartas de relación que después serán entregadas a Carlos V. La narración, desde el inicio no promete mucho, sólo una serie de cosas “agregadas y juntas”. Cortés escribe cuando la realidad se le ha acumulado, cuando aquello que está en la tierra es decible y escribible desde las letras de sangre y fuego que abren la puerta a la modernidad. Los motivos de Cortés son una maraña de enredos. Aún así, la voluntad del conquistador alcanza para saber que lo importante ya no era recoger el oro del suelo, “sino conquistar la tierra y ganarla y sujetarla a la Corona Real de Vuestra Alteza” (43), pues si los tantos secretos que Cortés percibe, una vez que se hace de lenguas en el “nuevo mundo”, son ciertos, entonces, para llegar al oro que se esconde, primero hay que hacerse de la tierra, despoblarla, poblarla y repoblarla. Las Cartas de relación de Hernán Cortés son menos la prolongación de la semiosfera de Colón y más la explosión y emergencia de muchas esferas. Cortés no mezcló dos mundos, mezcló una multitud de lenguas, desbarató con sinrazón iconoclasta y amistó con aquellos que muy pronto fueron amigos y luego a mayor velocidad se convirtieron en oprimidos.  

Desde lo molecular Cortés movió aquello que parecía ya fijo para él, para su tropa, para las tierras del valle de eso que todavía no se llamaba México y para aquella ciudad por la que tantos lloraron y lloran aún. Cortés carga el hierro y el pesar del ángel de la historia, tal como Orozco lo representara. Si hay una generalidad, entre tantas, que parece hilar aquello que aparentemente está ordenado y demanda la mirada de los ojos del soberano en las cartas que Cortés le escribe, es la necesaria tarea de Cortés por contarlo todo. La prosa de las cartas está profundamente preocupada por las formas en que ha de contar para dar testimonio, pero también para hacer el conteo de aquello que se suma en los afectos, pero no se registra ni en el habla ni en los hábitos por completo. La tarea del conquistador es luego de cortar cuerpos, contarlos, su hacer es el del tirano que inmediatamente contabiliza su botín y sus pérdidas. Para que el relato de relación pueda contarse, al conquistador no le bastaba con sobrevivir, sino con encontrar los instrumentos que pudieran medir la veracidad de sus palabras, pero también incitar la curiosidad del que escuchare o leyere. Sucede así, que las descripciones de aquellos cuerpos que expulsaban a Cortés de Tenochtitlan luego de comenzada la guerra se presentan casi siempre con una palabra que asusta por su desmesura. En una ocasión, como en muchas otras, se dice de los que expulsaban a Cortés que eran “tanta multitud de gente por todas partes, que ni las calles ni azoteas se parecían con la gente; la cual venía con los mayores alaridos y grita más espantable que en el mundo se puede pensar y eran tantas las piedras que nos echaban con hondas dentro de la fortaleza” (161). A su vez, están otros cuerpos contados, los de “nuestros amigos que estaban con ellos [las tropas de Pedro Álvarado], que eran infinitos, pelearon muy bien y se retrajeron aquel día sin recibir ningún daño” (251). En la guerra, los “naturales” no eran unos ni otros, tampoco enemigos, sólo unos que eran amigos y su número era infinito y otros que eran multitudes. Los amigos pueden ser infinitos porque aquello que no tiene fin incita a ser contado, aunque al contarse uno fracase en el intento. En cambio la multitud, o aquello que es múltiple, asusta porque su número no invita a la negación de ningún fin para contabilizarse, sino que el número de los cuerpos de la multitud es un “mucho” que se aglomera en un cuerpo abstracto. Los soberanos, después de todo, se consuelan en el infinito porque en esa negación de lo interminable se encuentra la repetición de aquello que ellos no son. No hay, a su vez, ningún soberano al que no aterren las multitudes, un sin “número” que asusta por su exceso y enormidad. 

Cortés no contabilizó con detalle muchas cosas en sus expediciones en los valles de Anáhuac y de Texcoco. Los cuerpos de quienes estuvieron en la guerra fácilmente se moldearon a las formas de cuantificar aquello que podría permitir la repetición de lo mismo (el infinito) y aquello que rehuía la contabilidad y la palabra del soberano (las multitudes). Otros cuerpos sí encontraron una gramática en el rotoso archivo del conquistador. De los primeros “regalos” que Cortés recibe de los señores de “Temixtitan” se dice que éstos fueron fundidos y “cupo a vuestra majestad del quinto, treinta y dos mil y cuatrocientos y tantos pesos de oro, sin todas las joyas de oro, plata, plumajes, piedras y otras muchas cosas de valor que para vuestra sacra majestad yo asigné y aparté, que podrían valer cien mil ducados y más suma; las cuales demás de su valor eran tales y tan maravillosas que consideradas por su novedad y extrañeza, no tenían precio ni es de creer que alguno de todos los príncipes del mundo de quien se tiene noticia las pudiese tener tales y de tal calidad” (132). Lo maravilloso no se funde pero por su singularidad, su “novedad y extrañeza” carecen de un peso y precio, son objetos únicos, algo que nadie más tiene y sin embargo, objetos que ya venían de otro territorio, que ya llevaban consigo una medida, una marca y una relación con un territorio. 

En las cartas de relación, al menos las primeras, se puede contar todo aquello que se puede fundir, todo aquello que se presente como maravilloso y todo aquello que sea infinito. La fascinación que el mercado de Tlatelolco generó en los conquistadores no sólo descansa en el hecho de que las semejanzas recibieran a aquellos que se veían a sí mismos diferentes, de que hubiera “hombres como los que llaman en Castilla ganapanes, para traer cargas” (135), ni tampoco de que algunas cosas aventajaran por mucho aquellas de la ya ahora tierra lejana, como esa “miel de unas plantas que llaman en las otras islas maguey [del algo de Texcoco], que es mucho mejor que arrope” (135). El mercado cautivó, sobretodo, porque “Cada genero de mercaduría se venden en su calle, sin que entremetan otra mercaduría ninguna, y en esto tienen mucha orden” (136). El mercado y su “cuadriculación” y orden iba también, a su vez, cargando con una supuesta falta: “Todo se vende por cuenta y medida, excepto que hasta ahora no se ha visto vender cosa alguna por peso” (136). Aquello que se ve como ausente es la medida absoluta, el peso de algo valuado por el ojo del soberano. La semejanza no alcanza para revelar que lo que se vende no sólo descansa en un mecanismo de cuenta y medida, pero que esa cuenta y medida en realidad es también aquello que puede ser “mucho” sólo en su condición y estado abstracto de ser ominoso. Lo que se cuenta y se mide no es el infinito, pero el ominoso peso de aquello excede, que por múltiple se mide en intensidad y por grande se cuenta por su medida. 

En el mercado de Tlatelolco se libró, tal vez, con mayor intensidad la guerra entre las multitudes de Tenochtitlan y los conquistadores y sus infinitos amigos. Alvarado apresuraba a Cortés para tomar el mercado, pues él se daba cuenta que “la gente de su real le importunaba que ganasen el mercado, porque aquel ganado, era casi toda la ciudad tomada, y toda su fuerza y esperanza de los indios tenían allí (261). Si el soberano murió por la propia mano de aquellos que lo miraban desde los pies de la pirámide, ahora que los amigos del soberano entraban con otros infinitos amigos, ¿qué habría que hacer para parar la debacle? Cortés dice ver la tristeza de la destrucción. Cuando la guerra ya es destrucción y exceso los conquistadores “hallábamos los montones de muertos, que no había persona que en otra cosa pudiese poner los pies; y como la gente de la ciudad se salía a nosotros, yo había proveído que por todas las calles estuviesen españoles para estorbar que nuestros amigos no matasen a aquellos tristes que salían, que eran sin cuento” (291). El suelo y las islas son ahora de carne y hueso y cada cuerpo que escapa, escapa ya no sólo de la destrucción, sino de la “decisión” de un soberano, que guarda a sus amigos de proseguir en la empresa de destrucción y muerte. Los que escapan van “sin cuento”, sin número, como estuvieron en multitud, pero ahora también, probablemente sin “cuento”, sin voz, sin historia. La misericordia del soberano radica en saber doblegar la voluntad, en asustar antes que en destruir por completo, pues viendo a los que resistían y no se rendían, Cortés dice que “mandé soltar la escopeta y en soltándola, luego fue tomado aquel rincón que tenían [los que resistían] y echados al agua los que en él estaban; otros que quedaban sin pelear se rindieron” (291). 

Con la destrucción de Tenochtitlan Cortés le puso letras y gramática al fuego y a la sangre de la historia de la modernidad. Igualmente, Cortés consiguió imponer una medida, un peso a lo múltiple (que se contaba y se medía), pues para ahora darle peso a su autoridad, todo aquel que dudara de esto sólo habría de ver y oír sobre la destrucción de la gran ciudad. A los primeros incrédulos el conquistador los hace “llevar a ver la destrucción de la ciudad de Temixtitan, que de verla, y de ver su fuerza y fortaleza, por estar en el agua, quedaron mucho más espantados” (298). Así fue que la destrucción se convirtió en moneda en boca de las lenguas de Cortés, así fue que su voz adquirió peso incluso en los oídos de Carlos V, y aún así, del mucho espanto de todos los que se escaparon, algunas veces más y otras veces menos, habría de volver siempre el espectro de lo múltiple. 

Notes about Accumulation(s) I

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The following notes are merely a series of thoughts without any particular order but that later (hopefully) could be part of my dissertation project (a very [till today] basic and naive ideas about accumulation as a general movement of history and specially modernity)

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Accumulation(s) I

In a way, our times could be described as a series of seriated and seriating accumulations. This, of course, not only testifies for capitalism’s endeavour but also for the way the climate catastrophe has heaped in the horizon of history as our further extinction. Yet, to accumulate does not necessarily means to horde valuable items neither to just let catastrophes pile in the horizon of the coming future. In fact, accumulations are closer to disorganized heaps, piles or bodies amassed (and therefore, somewhat to a weird idea of ecology, meaning that even the smallest tossed or dispensed body, would heap somewhere and eventually return to the place where it was thrown away). Etymologically (if this helps to clarify where I’m going), to accumulate is a verb whose first appearance was in the early XIV (1520) century and is composed by two particles, the preposition “ad” (to) and the substantive “cumulus” (a heap). Hence, in the early years of that period commonly called modernity, at the babbling of what centuries later would become a world ordered for capital through capitalism, a direction was forged, and bodies were constantly directed and redirected to it. 

The coincidence between the origins of the word accumulation and the early period (if not the dawn) of modernity signal that history, somehow, could be understood as a way of directing “cumulus” (heaps). It is not only after the works of Ricardo, Adam Smith and later Marx, that accumulation becomes a direction of wealth, for the first and second, and later, for the third, a production of that “ad” that directs the cumulus. When Marx famously described how the whole economic process worked, with the analysis of commodification, fetishization (another word —as accumulation— that was firstly coined in the context of slave trading in the XV-XVI century), capital circulation, value and surplus value, he still found necessary to unveil what started everything. For Marx, it is not that capital is merely understood as a machine, but as something that is triggered, something that needs to be started. Irremediably when understanding the process of accumulation(s) of capital, as Marx puts it, we “turn in a defective circle, out of which we only get by supposing an “original” [primitive]”, an “accumulation that is not the result of capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point”. That starting point, for Marx, “plays in Political Economy the same role that plays the “original sin in theology”. The result of this ironic comparison (and maybe not so ironic) is the famous formulation of the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation: that is the demystifying of an idyllic process of enrichment. From this perspective, the “so-called” primitive accumulation is the systematic repetition of violence, land dispossession, forced migration, law prosecution and bloody legislations necessary to produce an ambivalent subject that both surrenders to the “ad” of accumulation while also seeks for its “cumulation” in a line of flight: the vogelfrei. 

If the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation is needed at every stage of capitalism, where would the “ad” this time be produced when there won’t be no earth to live? Would it be that at best the feverish science fiction fantasies finally have been conquered (as depicted in movies like Ad Astra [after all, another movie about the possibility of starting a new process of accumulation in space)? As much as these questions are necessary, perhaps it should also be thought the possibility of an accumulation without “ad”, or an accumulation without “ad” or “cumulus” but another form of piling. Even more, perhaps that’s the only cynical comfort we have, that of which today accumulation is collapsing, and we are just hoarding history, as new vogelfrei we are tied to our impossibility towards the future and yet with the possibility of take off in a line of flight.

Notes on Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

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At the end of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) it is stated, as many times in the book, what a possible definition of postmodernism might be: “The postmodern may well in that sense be little more than a transitional period between two stages of capitalism, in which the earlier forms of the economic are in the process of being restructured on a global scale, including the older forms of labor and its traditional organizational institutions and concepts” (417). From this perspective, postmodernism is also a form of interregnum, since both share a level of uncertainty, at least when it comes to naming what or who is the new ruling name in town. In a way, Jameson’s book offers a continuation of what the Political Unconscious inaugurated, that is, a task of constantly historizing. Not surprisingly, this is precisely what Jameson states in the “Introduction”, since he writes thinking for an age that has forgotten how to think historically (ix). The task, then, for a postmodernism thinking is to realize how much of the past has persisted while at the same time acknowledging that commodity critique became another form of mere consumption. This means, of course, that the ultimate form of capitalism (Jameson’s post-industrial capitalism, aka, third stage of capitalism) is able to melt in the everything, that critique is just another object of consumption in a pure form, since “postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process” (x). 

As much as the book seeks to theorize, or, at best, illustrate, what postmodernism might be, it also constantly returns to modernism. If postmodernism is supposed to be understood via historicity, there is no other way than learning the past of that form that could be anywhere. This means that since postmodernism is a “cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features” (4), it hardly is foreseeable whilst also it is always present. Modernism, as an aesthetic form and content, might have challenged the ways and means of production, in the other hand, postmodernism emerges as a form of production that integrates into commodity production the aesthetic. It could be said then that postmodernism is (third stage) capitalism’s craving for the past, present and future, without clearly being able to produce its own historicity. 

Postmodern products (novels, films, buildings and so on) resist interpretation. For instance, about the postmodern novel, Jameson would say that it not only resists interpretation but that it “is organized systematically and formally to short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpretation which it perpetually holds on and withdraws” (23). Without, saying it, Jameson’s suggests that the postmodern is a discourse constantly hesitating, something that needs to cut with the old while sustaining it. Postmodern, in its own expression, has a level of undecidability —as much as Jameson refuses to use the deconstructive term (Cfr. Chp. 7). What is at stake when analyzing postmodern art, is not only its form but the way it also depicts the mode of production that produced it, namely a machine that is obsessed with the process of processes of reproduction. Art no longer holds together a monumental enterprise (if it ever did) but now it “reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts […] in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate hits of other texts” (96). Postmodernism ultimately is the addition of dispersed elements, a summatory of things that are distant in time and yet close to our senses. Living in postmodernism times is living distracted, eternally gone in-between the “wrapping shells” of non-centered spaces that demand our centrality and linearity as subjects of production-distribution-consumption. 

While it could be argued that Jameson too easily totalizes the production of culture in the late capitalism, it could also be said that this is not the project of postmodernism, or at least not the postmodernism that Jameson’s proposes. Jameson is aware that he must avoid auto-reification: “Permanent revolution in intellectual life and culture means both that impossibility and the necessity for a constant reinvention of precautions against what my tradition calls conceptual reification” (401). To this extend, thinking about postmodernism might, at best, open the possibility of reading literature (and history) as a series of movements and strategies. Thus, against reifying postmodernism, it should be thought beyond it. That is, if modernism was the movement and formation of monuments and its attractive force; postmodernism would come to be as an affective movement that brakes and disperses while sustaining what cuts. It might be said, then, that our current times (or even after the 60’s which are the times that Jameson analyzes the most), could be catalogued as a suspension and (another) regression (and return), from the brake of the postmodern and the fascination of the modern. We are not living the times of the “effacement of the traces of production” (314), as in postmodernism times we certainly did, but the times were scars are too visible, when what is effaced still accumulates, when non-subjects still matter and the global suspends the monad. And yet, the suspension (or stasis) of our times replicates more than nothing all that past that was supposed to be meted in the air, but somehow found us via partial summing ups.

Notes on Marxism and Form. Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971) by Fredric Jameson

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Some of the main ideas of Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious (1981), as we are reminded several times by Jameson himself, were already presented in Marxism and Form. Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971). To that extend, without Marxism and Form, we hardly would have read in The Political that the task of critique was to unmask “cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts” (The Political 20). Marxism and Form introduces some of the main critical works of dialectical Marxism on the arts and culture of the XX century. Jameson presents his readings of T.W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg (György) Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre. While Adorno, Lukács and Sartre have chapters on their own, Benjamin, Marcuse (read along Schiller) and Bloch are grouped in a chapter called “Versions of a Marxist Hermeneutic” (Marxism 60). The book finishes with a chapter that could bridge Marxism and Form and The Political Unconscious, “Towards Dialectical Criticism”. In this chapter we read that our “estrangement” or fascination towards literature is an affect related directly to the way art form is worked, since what our senses experience are “but manifestations in aesthetic form and the aesthetic level of the movement of dialectical consciousness as an assault on our conventionalized life patterns […] an implicit critique and restructuration of our habitual consciousness” (374). The Adornean sense of this affirmation is the same frame that will circle the canvas where the political unconscious will seek its task for unveiling myths and to give back, at least, a glimmer to consciousness and the real substratum (the formless of existence) that moves the engines of history. 

Marxism and Form not only presents but also challenges some of the main postulates of the authors reunited in the book. Yet, the challenge is more a comparison. As it is written in the “Preface”, the book intension is to present to the American reader the fact that when analyzing German and French dialectical literature one cannot but “take yet a third national tradition into account, I mean our own: that mixture of political liberalism, empiricism and logical positivism which we know as Anglo-American philosophy” (x). Thus, more than three perspectives we face two, that of the Anglo-American philosophy and that of the Franco-German dialectics. It is not surprising that at the end of the book, Jameson illustrates the importance of a dialectical method for analyzing literature with an analogy of the missile development and atomic research competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. With this example Jameson makes transparent how useful and accurate may a dialectical hermeneutics be. If dialectics is the method that glimpses the dominant categories that trigger the movement of history, in the 70’s what a better way of making a living than to learn how to read the board and the clock of the twilight struggle. 

It is not that Jameson is capturing dialectics and then surrendering it to the “American Imperialism”, but his argument is that dialectics as a tool for understanding reality is already caught up in American Imperialism. If Academia as Jameson pictures it, following C.Wright, is a system who endorses pleasure under capitalism, as something that “is simply the sign of the consumption of an object: it is thus relatively extraneous to the object’s structure or use, since it can attach to any kind of object, and is at the same time gratuitous to the degree that it serves no collective function beyond that of encouraging further consumption and making the system operate at top capacity” (395). Jameson, then, agrees with Adorno that in order to stop/sabotage capitalism’s jouissance dialectics must be “unpleasurable in the commodity sense” (395).  Criticism becomes a task that, as Jameson puts it in the eloquent closing of Marxism and Form, must “compare the inside and the outside, existence and history, to continue to pass judgement on the abstract quality of life in the present, and to keep alive the idea of a concrete future” (416). While in 1971 the idea of a concrete future was still foreseeable, in the following years of that decade that idea melted and both concreteness and future dispersed in the air. Did dialectics did too? That is yet one of the questions to ask.

Notes on The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) by Fredric Jameson

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The influential The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) by Fredric Jameson in a way brings debates about Marxism during the second half of the 20th century to the North American Academy. It is not surprising to see how the book, as much as it is fighting to offer a post-goldmannian Marxist analysis of narrative (considering Le dieu cache as one of the most ambitious Marxist literary criticism enterprise at the very half of 20thcentury) it also offers a productive discussion with new-criticism ways of interpreting and commenting literature. For Jameson, as it is stated early in the “Preface”, the main duty of any Marxist approach is to “Always historicize!” (9). It is then the task of The Political Unconscious to historicize the ways literature depicts the sublimation of ideologemes, which are the raw material of history and ultimately of literature itself. 

While the book is distributed in six chapters there is not really, necessarily, a progression in this distribution. That is, as much as the book seeks to historicize its historicity is not teleological at all. From this perspective, the first chapter advances most of the topics that would be discussed in the following chapters. The first chapter, “On Interpretation”, while seeking to build the theorical Marxist foundation of the book, also advances the main preoccupation of it: that of pointing out how every attempt of narrativization, and ultimately of history itself, cannot be represented if not by the textuality of a certain structure. This means that while history remains, in Althuserian terms, “a process without telos or a subject”, what is at stake, according to Jameson, is to repudiate any master narrative “and their twin categories of narrative closure (telos) and of character (subject of history)” (29). Consequently, more than denying the Althuserian dictum, Jameson seeks to unveil all metaphorizations and fake problems that hide the political unconscious of social life in general. If Jameson is not interested in denying Althuser, it is because history, more than a process that needs a subject, it is precisely the process that makes the subject conscious of its own subjectivity, hence, history is “inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization: its narrativization in the political unconscious” (35). While we won’t be able to know what happens to us, by reason and enlightment we can be able to retextualize history as it appears in the unconscious. As a symbolic act, fiction emerges as the field where the social speaks, and so do the ways into history has written its annals in letters of fire and blood. 

At times, the book comes and goes to its introduction. That is, it doesn’t matter (a lot) if we are dealing with Romanticism, the fictions of George Gissing, Honoré de Balzac or Joseph Conrad, what is at stake is to grab the raw materials of these works of fiction and propose a retextualization of them. That is, the tastk of any Marxist approach to literature would be to historicize the class fantasy of every work of art (87) as it is constantly emphasized throughout the book. While the analysis are relevant and in force until today —consider the fact that any literary form is likely just showing a struggle of diverse political unconscious while a leading fantasy attempts to capture and extenuate the potential of the other struggling fantasies—, it could be argued that the syntaxis of Jameson’s analysis (Romanticism, resentment in Gissing, subjecthood in Balzac and reification in Conrad) mystifies the way Romanic studies, or even, literary studies, has appropriated itself a political unconscious of domination over the rest of the world academia. In another front, the book also is more concerned in other challenges of contemporary (80’s) Marxist. For instance, Jameson mentions the problem of the “logic of collective dynamics, with categories that escape the taint of some mere application of terms drawn from individual experience” (294). Therefore, if everything must be rendered political, it is not only necessary to think history as an undecidable thing to be retextualized, but also to speculate the possibility of a politics without subject. This, of course, has been the task of many of the most relevant perspectives after Jameson’s Archimedean knowledge mover in The Political, and yet, these perspectives are more than an attempt to totalize the unconscious of the political, they are in fact the remainder of what Marxism is all about, as Jameson says when concluding his book.