This has the effect of making one feel as though they belong to a collective project, united in a common utopian bond for a better world and new possibilities beyond capitalism, even if they disagree with Jameson at times. In that sense, the use of plural pronouns simulates or performatively enacts the very goal of bringing about such a collective project or, one might say, a collective subjectivity, en concreto (without, obviously, being a substitute for real concrete action). Furthermore, it seems opposed, in my mind, to our contemporary ideological situation in which the fragmentation and dispersal of a unified subject under postmodernism has led to new, hyper-mediated and reified forms of “selfhood” engendered vis-a-vis contemporary “communicative capitalism.”¹

Perhaps what we need instead, and which certain modes of communication or ontologies fail to provide, is an authentic sense of collectivity, a “wishful participation that borders on enthusiasm” (as Kant said of the French Revolution) for a new form of collective praxis, in which possibilities of rupture and change suddenly erupt out of our flat, gray, atonal, and thoroughly globalized network of late capitalism. Such a project, of course, would be something like a new way of thinking the unity of theory and praxis for our ideological present.

1. To some degree, one might further identify the recent trends of “home-brewed” ontologies in our corner of the blogosphere in just this light: the fragmentation of a unified subject finds its full realization in the self-construction of entire universes, without any of these Weltanschauungen necessarily coming into direct contact or out-and-out contradiction with one another. Instead, they are referred to as “my” ontology, “my” toys, “my” ideas, and “my” project. Although they intend to describe being qua being, they are meant to be understood more in terms of individuation, drawing on highly localized networks, while even the loosely collective monikers themselves are of a dubious status, “under erasure.”