The exhibition opened last night, it's on. You're welcome to visit anytime you find during those days and also give us feedback if you wish. So without further ado I will offer a few contextual points that we hopefully also set the tune for today's discussion. Henry Fuseli's 1788-89 drawing, Artist's Move to Despair, shows a main figure at the bottom of two gigantic sculptural fragments, posited on what looks like both a tombstone and a pedestal.
The artist's resigned posture makes it look like as if he has been thrown on a similar tombstone. He sits with one hand on his head and the other on the sculptural fragment of the foot and his gaze hidden from the viewer. The artist is overwhelmed by the material presence of the past that these oversized fragments embodied. From closing the possibility to piece together the fragments to reconstruct the lost hole, the big foot and the half-open hand with a pointing finger directed upward hinted the notion of the past as one that is irretrievably lost. In the abyss of these laws, the exaggerated fragments come to supplement the unattainable whole and yet point at an uncertain future. Buried yet alive, inanimate yet spectral, these fragments blind the artist who is neither
able to face the viewer, the future to come, nor to look at the fragments themselves to see the past. Cut up in the melancholy of the present, between an impossible past and an uncertain future, the artist is driven to despair because he is yet unable to realise that the fragments contain hope and that hope is called history. Yet, despite the despair they caused, the way Fuseli has incorporated fragments from classical antiquity reveal a desire to attain an ideal. And it is this idea that hunts the allegorical presence of the fragments. Ruselli, after all, was one of the first translators of Winckelmann and specifically of his reflections
on the painting and sculpture of the Greek as early as 1765. I read this drawing as one that captures the advent of historical consciousness, When history is felt as a presence of an ideal captured in the material that bears the marks of time. Yet, the consciousness of historical realization is in a nascent state. Less than a year later, history in its modern sense would sweep Europe as the French Revolution violently overthrew the Ancien Regime and its representations. and it was also built on this classical antiquity that the ideal of the revolution was constructed. Historical consciousness arriving with guillotine
was what allowed the moderns to face the fragment as a historical artifact and thus unburdened oneself even if momentarily from its material weight. And it is this consciousness that a little less than 200 years later allowed Zeitungly to stare straight at the fragment of the pointed finger of the emperor Constantine, and be photographed by Robert Rauschenberg. This is the same fragment that Fuseli drew 200 years ago. Any effort to think time is necessarily a historical endeavor. One that is an act of making the abstract concrete, of encapsulating something that is immensely vast, variable and fluid, and of pinning down that which constantly escapes us,
yet what is formative for life itself. Historical documents, material objects, works of art, the entire material body of civilization that Marx calls man's inorganic body is a capsule that not only carries the memory of the past efforts to render the abstract concrete, but also unfolds in the future as a promise. Then what does it mean to think time today? Perhaps it does not only or not as much mean to make time an object of thought, but to make time or thought for thinking. Thinking time and the time of thinking is perhaps what can point the way out of the world's historical notion of contemporaneity, dominating today as what Peter Osborne calls a permanent seeming
seeming optimal and re-open the possibility for re-realizing historical consciousness. Ultimately, we seem to have arrived to the conditions of Fuseli's artists, within the so-called post-historical moment of the contemporary that has falsely sublated the idea buried in the fragment into so many fetishes of fragments and fragments of fetishism. The propositions, philosophical, historical, art historical, curatorial, that we will hear today in this room and also tomorrow will surely complicate our notions of time and yet it is through this complexity that we might be able to capture and understand our world today, one with immense contradictions and incongruities. What the papers propose is that to think time and the time of
thinking makes oneself out of joint with time or rather with the notions of temporality that dominate a particular epoch, and our epoch as well. I hope the temporality of this conference will precisely be this time at all to itself, and perhaps to that extent it's also anachronistic. And I want to thank everyone who came today to join us, as speakers, as participants, as audience members, and everyone who helped to put the conference together. the Arts and Humanities Initiative, the Department of Fine Arts and Art History, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Dean's Office,
as well as everyone who worked on the conference, and especially Shirin who did a lot of work these days. And I'll give the floor to Ray Brassier, our keynote speaker today, who's engaging with Jameson's work and his paper is entitled Absolute History. Okay, so firstly thanks for inviting me. Basically the focus of my paper is going to be Frederick Jameson's long essay called The Valences of History, which appeared as a concluding chapter of his 2009 book, Valences of the Dialectic.
The reason I'm talking, I want to just basically kind of present or kind of give an elaboration of Jameson's work is because I think it's really extraordinary and I'm not aware of, or at least I haven't come across many detailed discussions of it. So the paper is going to have three parts, a brief kind of preliminary section which I'll introduce in the methodological problems about thinking about time, then a discussion of Bergson's attempt to think time as in terms of lived experience or duration, and finally, then I'll move on to an elaboration of Jameson's intervention,
The way in which I think Jameson carries out this pretty extraordinary kind of reconfiguration of the problem of thinking time. So, yes, I've also got... Is that the term? No, no, yes, there's a... Relevant quotes will be on the PowerPoints. So, the attempt to think time poses a methodological problem because time is no ordinary object or phenomenon. So the philosophical theorizing of time is split between the metaphysical and the phenomenological approach. Metaphysics asks, what is time? Phenomenology asks, how do we experience time?
Aristotle is perhaps a paradigmatic example of the metaphysical approach. Despite or perhaps because of it, he construes time as a physical phenomenon. Time, according to its famous definition, is the number of motion with respect to the before and after. So time is defined in terms of the more fundamental notions of number, motion, and sequence, or what he calls before and after. Now it's often objected that before and after is a temporal distinction, so that Aristotle's definition begs the question. But actually, before and after can be taken to be earlier than and later than. and later than, and these are determinations of order that apply to synchronic structures
so that the notion of atentral sequencing is perfectly intelligible. In an numerical sequence, earlier than and later than, are determinations, are fixed determinations of position, and they imply no chronology at all. So it's not, I think it's not true that our default definition is cyclical. Still, the metaphysical approach faces two problems. What data are we to take as pre-eminently temporal? Are they to be physical, biological, historical, or psychological? If time is the number of motion, does this mean that motionlessness is equivalent to timelessness? But surely, motionless itself is conceived as a state during which time passes.
Does this then mean that time's passing is irreducible to objective measure? If we cannot determine which data qualifies intrinsically temporal, then we cannot determine which phenomenon should provide the starting point for our metaphysical investigation into the nature of time. And moreover, if metaphysics begins by asking what kind of thing time is, this investigation may misfire from the start precisely insofar as time cannot be conceived as any kind of thing. It resists reification. But the most common objection to the objective definition of time is that it cannot adequately account for our experience of the passing of time, a phenomenon that seems to be independent of every objective measure.
And this difficulty is famously formulated by Augustine. This is the famous passage from Augustine's Confessions, group 11, on time and eternity. So Augustine asks, what then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not. Yet I say boldly that I know that if nothing passed away, time passed were not. And if nothing were coming, a time to come were not. And if nothing were, time present were not. Those two times then, past and to come, how are they seeing the past now is not and that to come is not yet?
But the present, should it always be present and never pass into time past? Verily, it should not be time but eternity. If time present, if it is to be time, only comes into existence because it passes into time past, how can we say that either this is, whose cause of being is, that it shall not be? So namely, that we cannot truly say that time is, but because it is tending not to be. So this famous kind of discussion by Augustin, it points out the ontologically anomalous status of the phenomenon of time.
If we think of the present as what is, its positive consistency is driven by two negations, both of which are internal to it. The present that is not yet, and the present that it has been. So the consistency of the actual present is punctured by both these absent presences, on which it turns out to be dependent. Thus, Augustine was driven to think what is not yet and what has been as constitutive of what is actually present, such that the present exists as the distention encompassing the anticipation of what is not yet, as well as the retention of what is no longer. The distended present of consciousness exists as the differential articulation of past and future presence.
And this is of course a view that anticipates Husserl's account of the living presence as structured by the interplay of retention and pretension, as well as Heidegger's account of ecstatic temporality and being in time. Taking this distinction as its starting point, the phenomenological approach is more sensitive to the danger of ratifying time. But it faces one fundamental problem, and to see this problem we have to distinguish three registers of time. time. The three registers of time. A subjective register where time is individual experience, which is phenomenologically or existentially characterized. A historical dimension, time
as collective experience, which encompasses political, institutional and archaeological dimensions. And finally, time as objective, time as impersonal and non-experiential. And this is time as a physical, biological, theological, or cosmological phenomenon. Now, the articulation of these three registers presents a problem for the phenomenological as well as the metaphysical approach. If the subjective experience of time is a fundamental data, data, how do we go about reconnecting it to historical and cosmological time? Can phenomenology avoid subjectivizing time? The subjectivization of time internalizes it to individual consciousness.
So time's irreducibility is maintained at the cost of affirming the absolute primacy of subjectivity. And this is, of course, the mood made by Bergson, a sir, and Heidegger, each in their different ways. But he only attains full methodological self-consciousness in Heidegger, for whom existential temporality is the source of and condition for historical and cosmological time. Two problems then arise. First, how can the plurality of subjective times be rendered commensurate within a single impersonal historical time? Second, how can the boundary between personal and impersonal, experiential and non-experiential, be wholly inscribed within subjective time?
We will return to these issues below. The important thing to note for now is how metaphysics and phenomenology can inspire to sandwich history between subjective and objective time. And it's this sandwiching of history that Jameson will challenge in his paper. So, now we move on to the next section. Kant blends the methodological problem with a decisive twist. It seems that time yields no shade, according to Kant's famous diction in the Pretty Good Pure Reason. For Kant, it's precisely because time is a form of intuition that it is devoid of conceptual form. In Platonic terms, time is formlessness as such. So the problem of conceptualizing time is that of trying to give form to formlessness as such. Of course, formlessness as such is a paradoxical notion.
And this is why every attempt to formalize time is paradoxical. And it's also why time is a phenomenon that resists conceptual representation. Conceptualization, it only equates conceptualization with representation. Does this then mean it can only be grasped as pure presentation? Here it's important to learn of the difference between the Kantian claim that time as form of intuition is a necessary condition for the representability or cognizability of objects, and the claim that time is intuitive formlessness. The claim that formlessness as such can be directly intuitive is the temptation proper to any philosophy that thinks it can circumvent representation
by retrieving the immediacy of time's self-presentation in terms of so-called lived experience. Bergson is a preeminent advocate of this claim. It requires separating time from space. Space is quantity without quality, or repetition, partes, extra-partes. Time is quality devoid of any unit of measure, and hence quality without quantity. This is the first quote from Burritson, from Time and Free Will. In a word, pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes
which melt into and permeate one another without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with the number. It would be pure heterogeneity. In Bergson's account, the heterogeneity of duration cannot be aligned with a difference in extensity or space because it is sensed and not thought. It consists of sensible rather than intelligible rather than intelligible differences. Thus it is a-categorial. Bergson's favorite example is the unfolding of a melody. Any difference in the duration of any part of the melody alters the quality of the whole because the relation between part and whole changes unceasingly as a function of the difference between past and present.
Thus, difference in quality varies continually as a function of duration and cannot be tied to the specifiable difference between two discreetly individuated states. But it falls out that this qualitative difference can only be subjectively registered. To say that duration is lived, may cue as Bergson does, is to say that the subjectivity of duration is one with the subjectivity of sensation. Berkson then wishes to dissociate differences in sensation from differences in the representation of sensation. But to do this he must dissociate our ability to discriminate qualitative differences from
our ability to perceive qualities as properties of things, that is to say enduring substances. Now, while the ability to discriminate sensory inputs is constitutive of sentience, the capacity to perceive something as something is a conceptual ability that marks the transit, or the fundamental distinction between sentience and sentience, or the difference between feeling and knowing. In this regard, the distinction between substance and attribute, which of course Bergson constantly excised from his whole account of experience of duration, can be taken to be the reflexive
formalisation of the pre-reflexive discrimination between thing and property implicit in our practical comportments, our handling of things. And for many philosophers, Kant and Hegel most among them. This conceptualization of sensory discrimination signals the ascent from sensation to perception and marks a decisive step forward in our cognitive evolution. But for Bergson, conceptualization is metaphysically discredited precisely by its utilitarian origins.
The intellect selects, abstracts and generalizes, but these operations are determined by the needs, the vital needs of the organism. Experience is perception, but because our perception is limited, our organs invariably subtract, select and isolate elements from the flux of sensation. This is the second quote. If the senses and consciousness had an unlimited scope, if in the double direction of matter and mind the faculty of perceiving was indefinite, one would not need to conceive any more than to reason. Conceiving is a makeshift when perception is not granted to us
and reasoning is done in order to fill up the gaps of perception or to be able to understand. or to extend its scope. If then, on Bergson's account, conception produces the metamorphic movement of duration, this is because it is called upon to supplement the organic limitations of perception. This is why intellection for Bergson fixes and abstracts, selects and subtracts. It arrests the flow of duration, carving it into discrete states to which it then attributes determinate properties. Intellection abstracts generic properties from these determinate states by subtracting their particular differences.
And lastly, it uses these genetic properties to establish relations of similarity and dissimilarity between states in terms of measurable changes in quality. By way of contrast, what Bergson calls intuition is nothing but pure perception without selection or subtraction. So it falls in that for Bergson the reality of change can only be intuitive and not conceived. But what qualities of duration does intuition reveal? Since these qualities are not attributable to recognizable things, how are we to say what they are qualities of?
For Bergson, language and symbolization more generally is precisely the medium of conceptual generality that substitutes the utilitarian representation of things for the presentation of duration as such. The conceptual specification of qualitative particularity remains constrained by the linguistic structure of categorization. For Burkson, it's precisely categorization that elides the absolute heterogeneity of duration's qualitative singularities.
Yet the intentionality of perception, the perception of something as something, as this and not that, seems to require conceptual mediation. By purging sensation of the intentionality of conception, Bergson rejects Kant's intrication of perception and judgment. the claim that all perception involves judgment, which is Kant's great claim. So Bergson absolutizes the heterogeneity of sensation to such an extent as to render its correlates indiscernible, since in denying the ofness of sensation, or the object of sensation, he effectively and deliberately dissolves the distinction between sensing and sensed.
But then the question remains, what is sense if any identification of the object of sensation is already its conceptual sequestration? The fusion of sensing and sense and intuition is not the perception of sheer heterogeneity, formlessness as such, but the substitution of conceptual indeterminacy for the phenomenon of formlessness. This is ultimately to say that Bergson has to use language to communicate language's congenital inability to capture the heterogeneity of a duration whose intrinsic features he can only indicate linguistically, which is to say conceptual.
He has to resort to concepts to describe time's resistance to conceptual characterization. Okay, so now we move to the next section. So, Patty Bergson, time is not self-presentable. It does not show itself directly. There is no absolutely immediate experience of time as such, unfiltered by concepts, once it's understood that time, in a sense, is mediation. Mediation is, of course, the fundamental category of dialectical thinking. And to say that time is mediation is to suggest that to think dialectically is to think temporarily.
Now, to understand how Jameson proposes to approach the phenomenon of time, we have to understand in what sense he is a self-consciously dialectical thinker who eschews both metaphysics and phenomenology. How can we mark this difference? Kant taught us to distinguish the formally necessary properties of our representations of things from the necessary properties of things in themselves. Metaphysics for Kant is dogmatic to the extent that it mistakes the properties of representations for the properties of things. It assumes that things in themselves simply lend themselves
to representation. Dialectical thinking proposes to move beyond both the dogmatic representation of the thing itself and the epistemic formalism of Kant's critical philosophy with the claim that what Kant characterized as the discrepancy between representation and thing is in fact the thing itself insofar as it is no longer a self-identical substance but rather a concatenation of differences something that is not what it is and is what it is not if it will take contradiction to be constitutive and
most importantly for dialectics the difference between what the thing is and what we take it to be is internal to the thing itself. If time then is the ultimate source of differentiation, this means that dialectics thinks time as both the form and the content of the thing. It lets things appear in time while letting time show itself in things. The problem then is to understand how time can resist encapsulation within prefabricated concepts without transcending conceptualization entirely. What is to be resisted is a theological gesture that would relegate time's formlessness to
the realm of the utterly ineffable or the infinitely other. The challenge is to forge a form appropriate to the phenomenon of time as a new kind of phenomena, such that time impregnates the knowing of time. And this is to make formlessness appear. But to phenomenalize formlessness is not to stamp it with the seal of unity, because time is not one. This is a quote from James, okay? Only in the intersection of multiple kinds of temporality, can time itself, the important speaker such a thing, be made to appeal. The challenge then is to think time's heterogeneity, or better, its radical inconsistency,
without subjectivizing it in such a way that this inconsistency is relativized to the empirical multiplicity of subjectivities. Now, Jameson credits Heidegger with a decisive conceptual innovation as far as the thinking of time is going. Time is not a phenomenon, but the phenomenality of the phenomenon. It is not appearance, but the appearing of appearance. or what J. Gore, you know, Piedriger simply says a Greek word for appearance, the phanastia. Time as phanastia shifts the register of analysis from the metaphysics of presence
to the destruction of traditional ontology that overturns time's subordination to presence. This is, of course, Heidegger's task in Being in Time, the destruction of traditional ontology, which identifies being with being present, and with substantiality. But in Heidegger, this overturning operates by invoking another type of transcendence, the transcendence of Dasein as that being which is, in each case, mine. so that as Heidegger writes in his 1924 lecture The Concept of Time, which is kind of an encapsulation of the project of being in time and such, Heidegger writes, What is time? became the question, Who is time?
More closely, Are we ourselves time? Or closer still, Am I my time? Heidegger shows that you can't, metaphysics cannot but enlight the phenomenon of time in so far as it's hypothesized, it reified, it represents it, but the displacement of this reification, this representational reification of time involves identifying time with the phenomenon of mindless I know cause you know existence as that being which is in each case mine and notice the movement is that for having
the radicalization of the question of time is a question of appropriation you get closer and closer the way to think time radically is to grab is to make it closer and closer. So this kind of movement of appropriation is actually, Jameson I think rightly detects, is kind of the weakness of, or actually the unstated presupposition of Heidegger's whole attack. And of course it's criticized by Derrick. So Heidegger's overturning of the metaphysics of presence is carried out in the name of a metaphysics of propriety,
or ownership, authenticity, a ganklichkeit, which Jameson rejects precisely because it re-inscribes the manifold of time, its formlessness, within the form of mindness or propriety. Thus, Jameson wants to expropriate fanastia from the hermeneutics of propriety and use it to make formlessness appear. And this is the problem of figuring time. Figuration, in Jameson's account, is non-representational form. And Jameson draws on Rieker's account in time and narrative. Rieker proposes a hermeneutical alternative to Heidegger's
metaphysics of propriety, insisting that no, as Rieker himself says this, no pure phenomenology of time is possible. For Rieker, time's appearing is not a datum of intuition, as it is in Bertin, nor resoluteness towards death, as it is in Heidegger, but rather the result of a narrative configuration. Configuration is a form of narrative synthesis. And as Riker writes in Time and Narrative, the configurating act presiding over emplotment is a gerative act involving a grasping together. Configuration is a kind of a new kind of synthesis. This narrative
configuration or emplotment has three aspects of Riker appropriates from Aristotle's toitex. Peribeteia or reversal, anagnoloresis or recognition, and pathos or suffering. Now literary narrative for Riker exemplifies the configuration of time as the co-implication of reversal, recognition, and suffering in what Riker calls a dissonant concordance, freed from the impossible resolutions of teleological synthesis, whether metaphysical, or dialectical. Grieker's humanist agenda is clear. Narrative configuration gives shape to time beyond the fetishization of absolute heterogeneity
of a person, but also without reinstating historical teleology, as Hegel and Marx do, according to the . The problem for Jameson is that this configuration of time as dissonant concordance replaces Heidegger's martial individualism of being towards death with intersubjective consensus and a benign pluralism. The implotment of dissonance, what Rieger calls the implotment, the narrativization of dissonance, subordinates time to the form of intersubjectivity, which precludes catastrophic overturning, whose figures are the irreversible,
the unrecognizable, the intolerable. Yet catastrophe is precisely one of the figures in which history appears, as the violation of the personal by the impersonal. And Jameson is quick to affirm the dialectical corollary of this claim, which is precisely what distinguishes historical materialism from tragic pessimism. History also appears as liberation, as the emancipation of persons through impersonal institutions. And this is a long quote from Jason, which I'm going to read.
In the phenomenon that interests us here, the sudden flash of history, we must somehow account for the evidence that history, in that sense, can be experienced either as a nightmare or as a sudden opening and possibility that is lived in enthusiasm. He cites Kant's account of the French Revolution, the enthusiasm solicited in rational beings by the French Revolution. It is an alternation which suggests the existence of some deeper duality in the thing itself. The way in which, for example, the appearing of history, its fanastia, entails a new opening up of past and future life.
which can conceivably be marked antithetically, a sombre past of violence and slaughter giving way to a new sense of collective production, or, on the contrary, a glimpse of promise in the past which is shut down by a closing of horizons and universal catastrophe. Better still, both dimensions can be experienced at one and the same time in an undecisable situation in which the re-emergence of history is unrelated to its content and dependent above all on that form in which, after a long reduction to the lower visibility of the present, past and future once again open up in the full transparency of their distances.
So, this indissociability of ruin and accomplishment, of defeat and victory, beyond the reversals of narrative, for Jameson is but one symptom of a deeper duality in the thing itself. A fission which resists judicative synthesis and exceeds narrative configuration, but reveals history as a totalization and process. And this is a realization that Jameson attributes to suffering. History itself only appears within history. Or to quote Jameson, it is only on the occasion of certain of its events that history can be grasped as an event in its own right.
Thus, history is neither an all-encompassing continuity, nor a punctual interruption, but the interpenetration of the two. And more importantly for Jameson, it's not consciousness or narrative whose synthesizing acts make history appear. The synthesizing power that gives form to the formless multiplicity of temporalities, drawing them all into its orbit, is not subjectivity but capital as motor of globalization. Capital is the totalization in process of history as synthesis of subjective and objective time.
And this allows Jameson to re-articulate our initial triad. Subjective time, historical time, objective time. time. Jameson counters recurs idealist finestia with a materialist alternative in which it is the capitalist mode of production that makes both time and history appear. In our initial triad, historical time was sandwiched between subjectivity and objectivity, such that the philosophy of history pitted metaphysicians who subordinate historical change to natural becoming against phenomenologists who subordinate collective transformation to existential conversion. Jameson's great insight is that the difference between time and history must be made to appear
within each term of the distinction. To think the difference between time and history is to historicized time and to temporalize history. History becomes the mediation and process through which both subjectivization and objectivization become possible. It mediates the transition from the pre-experiential to the experiential, from objectivity to subjectivity, just as just as it mediates the eruption of the impersonal into the personal, and the reinsertion of the personal within the impersonal. So that's the, that's how Jameson re-articulates the triad with which we began.
History of totalization in process is the condition for both subjective time and objective time. Okay, I'll just five minutes now. However, as a Marxist, Jameson cannot remain content with identifying capital as the motor of historical totalization. Capital is not the pilot of universal history, even if it is its engine. Because history is a totalization in process, rather than an achieved totality, it is necessarily incomplete. Thus, for Jameson, it implies its own other, both as what it is not and as what it has never been.
What is not and has never been is the reservoir of formlessness from which every figuration of time is drawn, but a formlessness devoid of potentiality, since potentiality is already endowed with conceptual form. What is not, nor has ever been, is nowhere and nowhere. And of course it's utopia, as what Jameson calls the absolute negation of that fully realized absolute which our own system has attained. Utopia can only be figured, for Jameson, as the absolute other of systemic totality and totalizing event, as the other of substance and subject.
Or as he puts it, the alternate world contiguous with ours but without any connection or access to it. This alternate world is already actual rather than merely possible, yet its causal disconnection from ours renders it inaccessible. and in a justly famous passage Jameson concludes this is a final quote then from time to time like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one we are reminded
that utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces are still possible. There are two things worthy of no here. First, Jameson subjects Heidegger's ontologization of possibility as finite transcendence, of Dasein, to a dialectical reversal. It is now the existence, which is to say the non-objective actuality of utopia, that is the condition of historical possibility as such. But the question is, what is the precise nature of this possibility? Second, it is the causal disconnection between contiguous worlds that renders them mutually inaccessible.
But the evocation of flashes of light registering in a diseased and presumably unseeing eye seems to imply some sort of transmissibility across disconnected worlds. Is this transmission causal, such that establishing transworld access is a matter of forging new kinds of causality? And if so, does this entail that possibility is to be understood in terms of these new forms of causal interaction across disjoint systems? The key thing I think to note is that in Jameson the Gaird, the difference between actuality and potentiality is not ontological but epistemological.
logical so that actuality is indexically defined and this is actually it's very noticeable that Jameson invokes contemporary science fiction obviously but also contemporary physics and the multiverse hypothesis where you have a infinity of adjacent but causally disconnected universes all of which are And if actuality is indexically defined, the difference between actuality and possibility is a function of situatedness, of localization. The actual world is just this world, where this is like, you know, indexically defined, which is to say it's cognitively accessible to us.
But other currently inaccessible worlds are equally actual. Finally, you told me for Jameson it can never be a representation but an operation that exposes the limits of what is currently conceivable. It has no content other than its negation of extant conceptual forms. But this absolute negativity is its actual content. So the final suggestion seems to be that the challenge is to rethink possibility in terms of new modes of transmission from that which is currently unimaginable, which is the unformalizable
to that which, it's simply about forcing a transformation in the structure of formalization. Okay, I'll stop. I've gone on. Okay, I'll stop. I suggest we do a short spinning now and then perhaps after the time we can extend it. So if there are any questions, I'd like to ask. Yes. Yeah, thank you very much. I'm Lorando Rock, and yet I have a lot of questions.
One of the questions is, and speaking from my understanding of change, I see very much in the vision of the culture. And the culture's projects used to have been to narrativize fragmented reality and thereby open up temporal horizons that otherwise would be lost or would be blocked in contemporary practices. This perspective seems to be very different from that. How is it linked and where is the break with this particular horizon? Well, I'm afraid I'm ill-equipped to answer, I don't know Lukács well enough to really articulate the difference, the fundamental divergence between James and Lukács account. So I have to plead, I just don't know enough about Lukács to answer that question properly.
It seems, I mean... Yeah? But you then on the account of capital as totalization of these temporal horizons, I'd say. To which extent is other elements of practice involved in the interruption of these totalizing horizons? Okay. There would have to be, he doesn't say anything about it, but precisely because he thinks,
if utopia is an operation, not a representation, this operation is going to be both theoretical and practical. So in other words, he thinks that the attempt to expose that which is occluded by this totalization of process, or rather, which is the same. If you identify the point at which totalization deliberately presents itself as achieved, as accomplished, then you can point out this gap, this mismatch between what is actually what is possible.
In other words, you can mark the difference between what is currently noble, conceivable, practically achievable, and what might be what we can't imagine, what we can't think or conceive or even conceivably transform. You can mark that difference and then I think the suggestion seems to be that once you can mark that, you can identify the point of blockage and force it. I think. That's not a very... It's a negative operation. In other words, you pointed out that because totality, totalization is incomplete, the closure of the system, the idea that capitalism is as successfully as a self-inclosed totality, that's an illusion. That's one of its necessary transcendent.
That's the illusion represented by capital's own self-representation. Once you refuse to accept the terms of this capital's own representation of itself, then you can mark the discrepancy between totalization and totality. And you can identify points of inconsistency. Now, that doesn't, I mean, practically that's not a, that's not much of a practical prescription. But I think he has the resources to develop. Can I ask my question?
Yes, please. How is it different from the model of production in Marx, which is the idea of history, which is a combinatorial system of elements and relations, that gives all the possible historical networks and societies. And through this model of production, you can have the superstructure, the subjective attitudes, desires, and temporality, and at the same time, the objective ways to organize production, which could be related to objective time.
So is the idea of history as totalization process that articulates objective time to objective time, the same as the mode of production that sets the possibility of subjective temporalities, desires with articulated to objective, in Marx, in Marxism, at least in artisan reading of the capitalists. Is it the same, or...? Well, first of all, he rejects, you know, I think he rejects the Alas-Susarian reading. He doesn't accept the kind of structuralist accounts, the structuralist reading of Marx. And there's various points actually where he kind of criticizes the theory of over-determination, causal over-determination, and of structural causality.
So he rejects key features of the altruiserian mechanics. But the claim seems to be that the emergence of, is the material determinant for the, this process of totalization. It's the integrating factor. It's a factor that integrates these multiple temporalities, these multiple histories, into a single history. It forces, obviously, like, it's an act and it's kind of a through, you know, colonialization, etc., etc.,
with all the unpleasantnesses that everyone knows about. So history has a kind of... he wants to say that history has a material kind of condition. Because the ability... because history is not a data. There is no such thing as history. It's not a phenomenon. It is an experience that is conditioned by a certain... by a mode of production. And the way in which that mode of production simply kind of, you know, coordinates all social relations. All relations between humans and humans and between humans and non-humans. That's the claim, I think. So you've got the mode of production, then you've got history as totalization and process,
and then you've got the subjectivization and objectivization. so me when you ask me more about how exactly this so it's not so it's not static you don't have the static distinction between infrastructure and superstructure because the determination there is no kind of there's no structural causality in the motor production doesn't kind of simply underwriting these super structural effects in this static kind of way but I mean again I can't you know I need to
know more about Jameson's the specifics of Jameson's critique about his era to elaborate. But then there's the second part of your question I didn't answer. Could you speak off the mic? Yeah, if he considers this totalizing history as the mode of production, if he forget, you said no it's not it's not because no it's not saying there's a difference between motor production and history so the claim is that we can only begin what we call history is retroactively determined by the way in which we can conceive and imagine things in the current capitalist conjuncture that's
the claim. The claim is that there's no such thing... history can't simply be kind of... it's not a set of objective data that can be represented. It's in order for you to be... you know, history is only something that can be made to appear, but the condition of its appearing, both, you know, cognitively, both, you know, at the conceptual level, but also at the experiential level, he thinks is determined by the capitalist motor production. In other words, the capitalist motor production that determines the conditions of your experience, everything that you experience is determined by the capitalist motor production, but also everything that you can conceive and imagine is also indirect
in a less kind of saturated way. It's kind of mediated by this. But the key thing is that it's a totalization in process. This is why time, there's a time that's internal to capitalism as well. Capitalism is not an achieved total. It's something that's in process, which is why it's an unstable, it's an incomplete phenomenon. So this is why he wants avoid the claim that no the obvious rejoinder would be well how can you think outside this absolute is all-encompassing system let's not it's
not all-encompassing even though it's It's not all-encompassing because of time. Because time is both what propels it, what drives it on, but prevents it from every kind of satisfying its own compulsions, the mechanisms that drive it forward. Which is why I think he thinks that capitalism, well there's going to be people talking about this a lot, but changes fundamentally reconfigures time, changes the way in which time is experienced.