Category Archives: teoría

Notes about Accumulation(s)

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Accumulations II [and literature]

Our times are times of the novella. Isn’t it that day by day we question how is it that things have come to this? At the same time reality is coming closer to the durée of “the novel”, since we lived fascinated by the aesthetic contradiction between past and future. If all of this is true, what place would “the novel” hold? For some, like Fredric Jameson, the postmodern is fading away and in its place is now occupied by writing of “itemisation”, the withdrawal (or renouncement) of the attempt to ‘estrange’ “our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways” (“Itemised”). Karl Ove Knausgaard, Emmanuel Carrère and Valeria Luiselli would be just some items of this list. Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) captures in a nutshell what the current status of (Latin-American) fiction in early XXI century is. Yet, one should hesitate to simply take Jameson’s ‘itemisation’ of writing for granted. In a long passage in Luiselli, the main narrator of the novel states that “No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation” (Lost Children 103). The narration then enlists all of those things accumulated (months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises). The digression happens after the main narrator is asked by one of her children about what, how and when to take a photograph. The fact that, to explain the kid when to photograph, the narrator has to enlist both the emptiness of life, and the failure, of photographing in general when capturing or depicting our experience of time and life, illustrates an impossibility that the narration is aware of. The latter would be that “our ways of documenting the world have fallen short” (103) and consequently as much as experiences and other things are accumulated, the future seems unimaginable, undecidable. 

This moment could à la lettre describe what Jameson’s sees in Knausgaard’s sixth book of My Struggle (if not in all the books of the series). Itemisation would be the shift from the aesthetic to the ethical, abandoning the first so that one can as Knausgaard or Luiselli contemplate a “solution to the problem of what to do with [oneself] and [oneself’s] life” (“Itemised”). Hence, for Jameson writing of itemisation is, somehow, the end of the duration of the novel. Since the contemporary novel, as a genre, has to renounce to conjugate the past (what has happened) and l’avenir (what is going to happen), the novel now can merely register a list of items that tentatively would become rereadings, returns to duration. Yet, the novel is hardly a renunciation. In Luiselli, the narration bets for an opening to the future, while hoarding the previous items, “You have to find your own way of understanding space, so that the rest of us can feel less lost in time” (103), tells the mother to the kid so that he would start shooting photographs. There is no duration, but a two folded direction that moves forward in the same direction.

It is not that things have not changed for the novel. Neither it is that the “postmodern” is slowly fading away (if it ever was fully holding sway all over the world). For once, it is true that the novel as “all life is a process of breaking down”, would say Fitzgerald. Something broke in the sphere of the novel, and in the one of the literary. The novel was the genre that better held the hybridity of the new subjects that emerged from the process of so-called primitive accumulation at the dawn of capitalism. While the vogelfrei were attached to their necessity to sell their work in the market, their will was always fugitive. In a same manner the novel was (is) a living contradiction, namely between the writer and their context, the original and the translation, the new and the new. Only the novel knew how to pile together a contradiction. If novellas are cartographies of lines of flight, novels are diagrams of spheres whose functioning lie in opposing semiospheres. To this extend, if the emergence and popularization of novellas (ending of XIX century- and early XX century) marked the shift from industrial accumulation in capitalism and its acceleration, switch and cohabitation to and with algorithm accumulation in the current state of capitalism that we live today, we are not only witnessing the novellation of history, but also the novellation of the novel. If this is true, the contradiction, the main mechanism of the novel, is blurring. The itemisation is not a renouncement, neither the re-disjunction or re-conjunction of duration, “but only a line of flight in the process of being drawn, toward a new acceptance, the opposite of renunciation or resignation —a new happiness?” (Deleuze and Guattari 207), and yet another process of hoarding, a new redirection of accumulation. And still, an opening for heaping history and the novel anew.

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 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.