RAY BRASSIER
JAMESON ON MAKING HISTORY APPEAR
The difficulty of thinking about time is a consequence of the problem of objectifying time.
I propose to introduce this problem by examining Fredric Jameson's approach to it in his
remarkable essay, "The Valences of History." Initially, I will summarize what I think is the
methodological problem in thinking time, and then I will critically discuss Bergson's attempt
at resolving this problem in relation to Kant, Heidegger, and Ricoeur. Finally, I will present
Jameson's novel recasting of the problem and consider some of its ramifications.
THE METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEM
The attempt to think time poses a methodological problem because time is no ordinary object
or phenomenon. The philosophical theorizing of time is split between the metaphysical and
phenomenological approaches. Metaphysics asks: What is time? Phenomenology asks: How do
we experience time?
Aristotle is the paradigmatic exemplar of the metaphysical approach. Despite or perhaps
because of it. he construes time as a physical phenomenon: time is “ the number of movement
in respect of before and after."2lime is defi ned in terms of the more fundamental notions of
number, movement, and sequence ("before/after” ). It is often objected that "before/after" is a
temporal distinction. so that Aristotle's definition begs the question. But "before/after" can be
taken to mean “earlier than" or "later than," which are determinations of order that apply to
synchronic structures, so that the notion of atemporal sequencing is perfectly intelligible.
Still. the metaphysical approach faces two problems: What data are we to take as preeminently
temporal - physical. biological, historical and/or psychological? If time is the number of motion,
does this mean that motionlessness is equivalent to timelessness? But surely motionlessness
itself is conceived as a state during which time passes. Does this mean time's passing is
irreducible to objective measure? If we cannot determine which data qualify as intrinsically
temporal. then we cannot determine which phenomenon should provide the starting point for
our metaphysical investigation into the nature of time. Moreover, if metaphysics asks 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.
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. This difficulty is famously formulated by Augustine:
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I
know not: yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, time past 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 cometh into existence. because it passeth 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?3
32
l RayBtassief
Time is ontologically anomalous. If we think of the present as what is, its positive consistency
is riven by two negations, both of which are internal to it: the present that it is not yet and the
present that it has been. 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
1. Fredric Jameson. Valences o f the D ie te tic (L^ondon and
New York: Verso. 2010L 47H12.
2. Aristotle. Physics, bk. 4, trans. W. 0. Ross (Oxford:
Clarendon Pres. 196), 11: 220a, 24, 387.
yet and what has been as constitutive of what is actually present; such that the present exists
as the distension 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 presents. This is, of course, a view that anticipates Husserl's account of the living
present as structured by the interplay of retention and protention, as well as Heidegger's account
of ek-static temporalization.4
3. Augustine. Confe»/ons, bk 11. §17, trans. E B Pusey
(New YoOc E. P. Duton and Co., 1950). 287.
4. Edmund Husserl. On lhfl
of the
Cansc/aus^^of/nr^ema Time. 1^^1917. trans J.
Barnett Brough (to rd r^t: Kl^uwer
^20);
Martin Heideger. Being and Time. trans. J. MMacquare
Taking this distension as its starting point, the phenomenological approach is more sensitive to
the danger of rei fying time. But it faces a fundamental problem; one which becomes apparent
once we distinguish the three registers of time:
and E. Robinson (Oxford: Bl^acicwell. 1962).
5. Immanuel Kant.
of Pure Re^ason. trans. P G^w
and A. W. Wood (Cambridge: C a ^ ^ ^ ^University Pres.
199). 163.
■ Subjective: time as individual experience; phenomenological/existential
■ Historical: time as collective experience; political/institutional/archaeological
■Objective: time as impersonal and non-experiential; physical/biological/geological/cosmological
The articulation of these three registers presents a problem for the phenomenological as well
as the metaphysical approaches. If the subjective experience of time is our fundamental datum.
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.
Time's irreducibility is maintained at the cost of affirming the absolute primacy of subjectivity.
This is the move made by Bergson. Husserl, and Heidegger. each in his own way. It only
attains full methodological self-consciousness in Heidegger, for whom existential temporality
is the source of and condition for historical and cosmological (i.e., world) 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 conspire to sandwich history between subjective and objective time. It is this
"sandwiching" of history that Jameson will challenge.
TIME AS FORMLESSNESS
Kant lends the methodological problem a decisive twist: "Time yields no shape:5For Kant, it
is precisely because it is a form of intuition that time is devoid of conceptual form. In Platonic
terms, time is formlessness as such. 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.
Indeed. every attempt to formalize time is paradoxical. This is why time is the phenomenon that
resists conceptual representation. Does this then mean it can be grasped as pure presentation?
Here, it is important to mark the difference between the Kantian claim that time, as a form of
intuition, is a necessary condition for the representability (i.e., cognizability) of objects and the
claim that time is intuited formlessness. The claim that formlessness, as such, can be directly
33
JAMESON ON MAKING HISTORY APPEAR
intuited 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 the pre-eminent advocate of this claim. It requires separating time from space.
Space is quantity without quality, repetition partes extra partes. Time is quality devoid of any
unit of measure. and hence quality w it hout quantity :
In a word. pure duration might well be nothing but a success ion of qualitative changes
which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outl i nes. without any tendency
to externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it
would be pure heterogeneity.6
In Bergson's account, the heterogeneity of duration cannot be aligned with difference in
extensity (space) because it is sensed, not thought. It consists of sensible, rather than
intelligible. differences. Thus it is acategorical. Bergson's favored 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 betw een part and whole changes unceasingly as a function
of the difference between past and present. Thus difference in quality varies continually
as a funct ion of duration and cannot be tied to specifiable differences between discretely
individuated states.
But this qualitative difference must be subjectively registered. To say that duration is "lived"
( v£cue) is to say that the subjectivity of duration is one with the subjectivity of sensation.
Bergson 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 th in g s - 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 ab ility that marks the transit
from sentience to sapience, and the difference between feeling and knowing. In this
regard, the distinction between substance and attribute can be taken to be the reflexive
formalization of the pre-reflexive discrimination between thi ng and pr operty implicit in our
practical comportment. For many philosophers - Kant and Hegel foremost among them - this
conceptualization of sensory discrimination signals the ascent from sensa tion t o percept ion.
and marks a decisive step forward in our cognitive evolution. But for Bergson. conceptualization
is metaphysically discredited by its utilitarian origins. The intellect selects, abstracts, and
generalizes. but these operations are determined by the needs of the organism. Experience
is perception, but because our perception is limited, our organs subtract. select. and isolate
elements from the flux of sensation:
If the senses and consciousness had an unlimited scope, if i n the double direction of
matter and mind the faculty of perceiving w as indefinite, one would not need to conceive
any more than to reason. Conceiving is a makeshift when perception is not granted us, and
reasoning is done in order to fill up the gaps of perception or to exte nd it s scope.7
34
I RayBtassief
If conception traduces the metamorphic movement of duration, this is because it is called
upon to supplement the organic limitations of perception. Intellection fixes and abstracts.
selects and subtracts. It arrests the flow of duration. carving it into discrete states to which it
attributes determinate properties. It abstracts generic properties from these determinate states
by subtracting their particular differences. Lastly, it uses these generic properties to establish
relations of similarity and dissimilarity between states in terms of measurable changes in quality.
6. Henri Bergson. Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. P^ogso
(New Vorlt: Harper. 19601. 104
7. Henn Bergson. "The P ^p tio n of Change," in
M/nd. trans. M. L. Andison (Tot<owa, NJ. Littlefield
Adams and Co.. 1975). 131.
By way of contrast. Bergsonian intuition is nothing but pure perception, without selection
or subtraction. Thus the reality of change can only be intuited, 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
land symbolization, more generally) is precisely the medium of conceptual generality that
substitutes the utilitarian representation of things for the presentation of duration (time) “as
such." The conceptual specification of qualitative particularity remains constrained by the
linguistic structure of categorization. But for Bergson it is 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 . not th a t- seems to require
conceptual mediation.
By purging sensation of the intentionality of conception. Bergson rejects Kant’s intrication
of perception and judgment. Bergson absolutizes the heterogeneity of sensation to such an
extent as to render its correlate indiscernible, since in denying the "of-ness” of sensation, he
effectively land deliberately) dissolves the distinction between sensing and sensed. But then the
question remains: w hat is sensed. if any identification of the object of sensation is already its
conceptual sequestration? The fusion of sensing and sensed in intuition is not the perception of
sheer heterogeneity - formlessness, as such - but the substitution of conceptual indeterminacy
for the phenomenon of formlessness. This is 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 conceptually. He has to
resort to concepts to describe time's resistance to conceptual characterization.
FROM FIGURATION TO PH AIN ESTH AI
Pace Bergson, time is not self-presenting; it does not show itself directly. There is no absolutely
immediate experience of time as such, unfiltered by concepts, once it is understood that time
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 temporally: this is
Jameson's fundamental contribution to the problem of thinking time. But to understand how
Jameson construes time as mediation, we have to understand in what sense he is a self
consciously dialectical thinker - one who eschews both the metaphysical reification of time and
its phenomenological subjectivization. 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 is dogmatic to
the extent that it mistakes the properties of representations tor the properties of things. It
35
JAMESON ON MAKING HISTORY APPEAR
assumes that things in themselves 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 philosophy. It does so through the insight that what Kant
characterized as the discrepancy between representation and thing is. in fact. the thing
itself. But the thing itself is no longer a self-identical substance; it is rather a concatenation
of differences: something that is not what it is. and is what it is not. 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 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 the
theological gesture that would relegate time's for mlessness to the realm of the utterly
ineffable or infinitely other. Thus the challenge is to forge a form appropriate to the
phenomenon of time as a new kind of phenomenon, such that time impregnates the knowing
of time. This is to make formlessness appear. But to phenomenalize formlessness is not to
stamp it with the seal of unity. Time is not one. As Jameson puts it: “ Only in the intersection
of multiple kinds of temporality can Time itself - if one can speak of such a thing - be made
to appear. "8 The challenge 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.
Jameson credits Heidegger with a decisive conceptual innovation as far as the thinking of
time is concerned. Time is not a phenomenon. but the phenomenality of the phenomenon;
it is not appearance, but the appearing of appearance. or p ha inesthai. Time as pha ine sth ai
shifts the register of analysis from the metaphysics of presence to the destruction of
traditional ontology that overturns time's subordination to presence. But in Heidegger
this overturning operates by invoking another type of transcendence. the transcendence
of Dasein . as that being which is in each case m/ne. As Heidegger writes in his 1924
lecture The Concept o f Time. "What is time became the question: Who is time? More
closely: Are we ourselves time? Or closer still: Am I my time?"9 Heidegger's overturning
of the metaphysics of presence is carried out in the name of a metaphysics of propriety or
"authenticity" (e ig e n tlic h k e i which Jameson rejects precisely because it reinscribes the
manifold of time, its fo rmlessness. within the form of mineness or propriety. Thus. Jameson
wants to expropriate phainesthai from the hermeneutics of propriety and use it to make
formlessness appear.
This is the problem of figuring time. Figuration is non-representational form. In Time and
Narrative, Paul Ricoeur proposes a hermeneutic alternative to Heidegger's metaphysics
of propriety, insisting that no pure phenomenology of time is possible.10 For Ricoeur.
time's appearing is not a datum of intuition (Bergson), nor a resoluteness towards death
(Heidegger). but rather the result of a narrative configuration. Configuration is a form of
narrative synthes is: “The configurating act presiding over emplotment is a judicative act.
36
l RayBtassief
involving a 'grasping together'."" This narrative configuration or "emplotment" has three
8. Fredric Jameson, Valences o f the Dialectic. 501.
j aspects that Ricoeur appropriates from Aristotle's Poetics:
9. Martin Heidegger. The (^Concept o f Time. trans. W. McNeill
• Peripeteia - reversal
• Anagnorisis - recognition
■ Pathos- suffering.
(Oxford: Blackwell. 19921. 22£.
10.Paul Ricoeur. rm eandN arratve. wl. 1. trans. K.
Mclaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of
Chicago Ples. 19841. 83.
Literary narrative exemplifies the configuration of time as the co-imbrication of reversal.
recognition, and suffering in a "dissonant concordance" freed from the implausible resolutions
of teleological synthesis, whether metaphysical or dialectical. Ricoeur's humanist agenda
is clear: narrative configuration gives shape to time beyond the fetishization of absolute
heterogeneity (Bergson). but without reinstating historical teleology (a la Hegel and Marx).
The problem for Jameson is that this configuration of time as "dissonant concordance"
replaces the martial individualism of "being-towards-death" with intersubjective consensus
11. Paul Ricoeur.
and NNart/ve. vol. 2. trans. K.
^Laughlin and 0. Pellauer (Chicacago: University of
Chit^cago Prett, 1911. 61.
12. Fredric Jameson. V a l e ^ of the
S98
13. Ibid.. 592.
and conciliatory pluralism. The “emplotment" of dissonance subordinates time to the form of
intersubjectivity, which precludes catastrophic overturning, whose figures are the irreversible.
the unrecognizable, and the intolerable. Yet catastrophe is precisely one of the figures in
which history appears as the shattering of consensus and the violation of the personal by the
impersonal. Jameson is quick to affirm the dialectical corollary, which distinguishes historical
materialism from tragic pessimism: history also appears as liberation, as the emancipation of
persons through impersonal institutions:
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. It is an
alternation which suggests the existence of some deeper duality in thing itself: the way
in which, for example, the appearing of History, its phainesthai. entails a new opening up
of past and future alike, which can conceivably be marked antithetically: a somber 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 in
universal catastrophe. Better still. both dimensions can be experienced at one and the
same time in an undecidable situation in which the reemergence of History is unrelated
to its content and dependent above all on that form in which after a long reduction
to the lowered visibility of the present. past and future once again open up in the full
transparency of their distances.12
The indissociability of ruin and accomplishment. defeat and victory. beyond the reversals of
narrative. 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 totalizationin-process. This is a realization that Jameson attributes to Sartre: History itself only appears
within history: "it is only on the occasion of certain of its events that History can be grasped
as an Event in its own right. "'3 Thus History is neither an all-encompassing continuity nor a
punctual interruption, but the interpenetration of the two. More importantly for Jameson. it is
not consciousness or narrative whose synthesizing acts make History appear. The synthesizing
37
JAMESON ON MAKING HISTORY APPEAR
power that gives form to the formless multiplicity of temporalities, drawing them inexorably
into its orbit, is not subjectivity, but Capital as the motor of globalization. Capital is the
totalization-in-process of Histo ry as synthesis of subjective and objective time.
This allows Jameson to rearticulate our initial triad: subjective time, historical t ime. objective
time. Jameson counters Ricoeur's idealist pha/nesfha/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 obj ectivity such that the philosophy
of hist ory 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 distin cti on. To think the di ff erenc e between time and history
is to historicize time and to temporalize history. History becomes the mediation-in-process
through which both subjectivization and obj ectivization become possible. It mediat es the
transition from the pre-experiential to the experiential. from objectivity to subjectivity, just as it
mediates the eruption of the impersonal into the personal, and the reinsertion of the personal
within the impersonal:
Histo ry (tot aliz ati o n- in - pro c e ss)
-------------------------
Subjective time
-------------------------
Objective Time
-------------------
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 total ity, it is necessarily
incomplete. Thus it implies its own other. both as what it is no t and 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 nowhen. It is Utopia as
the “absolute negat ion of that fully realized Absolute which our own system has attained.” 1A
Utopia can only be figured as the absolute other of systemic totality and totalizing event.
substance, and subject: "the alternate world contiguous with ours, but without any connection
or access to it."15This 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: "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 ano ther world
suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other
spaces. are still possible.” 18
ACTUALIZING THE IMPOSSIBLE
Three things are worthy of note here. First, Utopia, Jameson argues. "is not a representation.
but an operati on calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the
lines beyond which we do not seem able to go in i mag in ing chan ges in our own society and
world (except in the direction of dysto pia and catastrophe. " ,7 Utopia can only be figured as
38 l RayBtassief
the impossibility of what is currently representable, conceivable, or imaginable. But this
14 lbod.. 612.
impossibility is actual. says Jameson. Thus Jameson subjects Heidegger's ontologization of
possibility as finite transcendence to a dialectical reversal: it is now the "existence", i.e., the
nonobjective actuality of Utopia as conceptual impossibility that is the condition of (historical)
possibility as such.
15.Ibid., 612.
16 lbtd. 612.
17.lbld. 413.
Second. actuality is indexically defined: the actual world is just this world, the spatiotemporal
continuum we col lectively inhabit that is cognitively accessible to us. But other worlds.
although cognitively inaccessible to us, are equally actual; they are just not ours. In a
probably unintended echo of David Lewis, Jameson recodes the actual/possible distinction
as an epistemological difference. rather than an ontological difference. It is not a difference
in being, but a difference in knowing.’8 More specifically, it is the difference between the
conceivable and the inconceivable, which here stands as a cipher for the difference between
the knowable and the unknowable. But if this impossibility merely marked the crack or fissure
in what is currently conceivable, if it merely figured the impossibility proper to our system,
18. ’ Our factual
is only one world
mothers We
cal it alone factual not ^because 11 diHers in kind from
all the
but
ii is Ille world we
The
ii^nhallants of olhef worlds may truly call
<own
^worlds actual. if they
the ^meaning we p
by 'actual' what we do. for
to '^actual' is such Iha! it refers 11
ito thatntseH. 'Actual* is iindexical.
lite I', or 'hen!'. or , _ ' . it
for its r e t^ ^ n on
the ri^cirtumsl^ances of un ^rce. to wit the
^whele
the
is Ilocated ' ^David
(Oxford. Basil B^lackwell. 19731. ^115-6
it would remain a second-order representation: the representation of the unrepresentable.
From a dialectical point of view, the crack or fissure must acquire a positive valence
within our current conceptual system. What prevents the unrepresentable from becoming
hypostasized as a transcendent thing is the very act of conceiving it as a fissure for us. which
condenses into an obligation for us to do something. This condensation proceeds through the
work of conceiving the inconceivable; an effort that turns it into a reason for the practical
transformation of what is.
This brings us to our third and final point. It is the causal disconnection between contiguous
actual 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 due to some unknown kind of
causation? Is transit across worlds a matter of forging new kinds of causal connection. both in
theory and in practice? And if so. does this entail that "possibility" is to be understood in terms
of these new forms of causal interaction across spatiotemporally disj oint systems?
39