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Collective Projects, Plural Pronouns
I’m just on the verge of finishing Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic, and expect to write a larger post soon analyzing Jameson’s notion of “making History appear,” but I noticed one rather minute tendency of Jameson’s that I wanted to point out now, which is that Jameson frequently refers to a collective “we,” “us,” and “our” in his writing, particularly those sections that have a sort of messianic or utopian import. For example, at certain points throughout the book Jameson writes, “But pathos here will commit us to the attempt to transform Ricoeur’s project…,” “A few preliminaries before we can make so audacious a claim…,” “Our question must then turn on the affinity between…,” and so on.
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…