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…

# posted by Bryan  tags: collectivity, late capitalism, ontology, praxis, revolution, subjectivity

Uniting Subject and Structure

Last night, as I was reading Adrian Johnston’s Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, I noticed an interesting isomorphism between Badiou and Kojin Karatani (Žižek fits here as well, I’m just too lazy to pull out efficacious quotes):

In Logiques des mondes, further evidence surfaces of Badiou tending (at least temporally) to prioritize names over affects in the process of forcing [forçage]. Therein, he characterizes courage as a capacity to face “points.” One of the conceptual coordinates added to Badiouian philosophy by this sequel to Being and Event is this concept of the point. In several contexts, Badiou, avowedly influenced in his youth by both Sartre (proponent of a philosophy of freedom celebrating the powers of subjectivity as an autonomous negativity) and Althusser (advocate of a structuralist Marxism denigrating Sartrean-style subjectivity as an ideological illusion secreted by trans-individual sociohistorical mechanisms), confesses that one of his deepest-seated philosophical ambitions has always been and continues to be to succeed at combining these two seemingly antithetical influences as indispensable parts of a single philosophical orientation.¹

Although not entirely related, I believe that the polyvalence of subject here (between “subject” as radical Sartrean-style “autonomous negativity” and “subject” as Althusserian-style “structural subjection”) figures directly into a critique of certain flat or object-oriented ontologies. Quoting Johnston:

According to Logiques des mondes, some worlds (although not all worlds), as onto-logical situations…contain within themselves points qua nodes which, when confronted, force an either/or choice between mutually exclusive alternatives (some other worlds, designated

…

# posted by Bryan  tags: Adrian Johnston, Alain Badiou, existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kojin Karatani, structuralism, subjectivity