Citation
Contents
- Representation and the Abyss of Subjectivity 1
- Presentation beyond Representation: Kant and the Limits of Discursive Understanding 22
- The Speculative Proposition: Hegel and the Drama of Presentation 53
- Marx’s Key Concept? Althusser and the Darstellung Question 84
- Figuration and the Sublime Logic of the Real: Jameson’s Libidinal Apparatuses 127
- The Theater of Figural Space 182
- Can the Symptom Speak? Hegemony and the Problem of Cultural Representation 235
Author
Context
Thesis
Hartley describes how modern theory from Kant through Lacan attempts to come to terms with the sublime limits of representation and how ideas developed with the Marxist tradition—such as Marx’s theory of value, Althusser’s theory of structural causality, or Zizek’s theory of ideological enjoyment—can be seen as variants of the sublime object. Representation, he argues, is ultimately a political problem. Whether that problem be a Marxist representation of global capitalism, a deconstructive representation of subaltern women, or a Chicano self-representation opposing Anglo-American images of Mexican Americans, it is only through this grappling with the negative, Hartley explains, that a Marxist theory of postmodernism can begin to address the challenges of global capitalism and resurgent imperialism.
Methodology
Endless pages of talking
Key Terms
Hegel’s Absolute Negativity
Criticisms and Questions
Notes
- Representation and the Abyss of Subjectivity
-The abyss is not a problem of the subject, as the result of the subjects limited capacity for knowledge Beyond sensory experience, but the very ground of the subject: this paradox of a grounding Abyss means nothing more than that the subject is this space of inclination ability as such, the problem residing rather on the side of substance.
-Clear is no ideology/ representation without the category of the subject: the category of the subject is constituentive of all ideologies, But the category of the subject is constituent of of all ideologies insofar as all ideologies has the function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects.
– subjectification/ interpolation is nothing but the attempt to cover over the traumatic recognition of the abyss of subjectivity as such. this confrontation with the traumatic thing is the subject as such. interpolation, on the other hand, is the exact attempt to avoid this confrontation.
– the job of idealogy criticism is to identify the position in the other that functions as the desire that the hysteric desires to please.
- Kant
– if one agrees with Jameson that the sublime object for us in this post modern age is no longer nature but the vast network of global capital this in no way changes the fundamental structure of the experience of the sublime as Kant outlines it in the critique of judgment. Kant Conte says judgment is a bridge that spans the abyss between the real and the sensible.
– kant’s conception of the negativity of the symbol never the last prepares the way for hagel’s project of dialectical negation. What is presented in the symbol is symbolism is a mode of thinking the limits of thinking itself of the negative relationship between discursive understanding and its own discursive limits.
– because of the limits of discourse language can never give a pure representation of super sensible objects it’s symbolic presentations always carry and excessive element within them an unintelligible thing at the heart of the presentation of the supersensible that prevents language from ever becoming a closed symbolic system.
- Hegel
– Speculative language is not some foreign word from above that captures in itself the imported means to convey because hegel’s theory of language denies any such immediacy. The sign must be emptied out, become some stupid contingent and meaningless thing devoid of any associations with a particular image or intuition and through the radical negativity of it stupidity embody the point of articulation of the subject. Speculative language is ordinary language only more so. Our ordinary language is more than sufficient to provide us with an adequate presentation of the drama of the speculative.
- Althusser and the Darstellung Question
If we are to analyze economic or social or any illogical phenomena in terms of the mode of production with which they operate then we must construct a concept capable of conveying the type of causality at work in the whole.
– the task facing readers of marks Althusser implies is to purify the Marxist text of its pre-scientific metaphors its Figures it’s vorstellungin its dependence on representation.
-Three Notions of Darstellung operating here at once:
-Kant’s concept of versinlichung with its emphasis on the flushing out of the concept.
– the Hegelian sense of scientific method the motive Exposition adequate to the nature of the dialectic
– A sense that I have yet to explore and Althusser points to above the Marxist sense of the presentation of value in commodity production that has a relationship to but cannot be reduced to Consciousness which must rather be seen as an objective historical structural effect.
-The question at stake here is an epistemological 1 concerning our ability to read the structural determinations of the value relation or relation that appears in a mystified form in a society based on commodity production. The key is to see this mystification, however, not as a problem of our ability to see, of our consciousness, of our any law gical shortcomings, of our failure to see what lies before us and is simply hidden beneath a mystifying exterior but to see this mystification instead as a structural effect, and effect of the very structure of commodity production itself. Fetishism is an objective effect of the structure of the value of relation in commodity production, not a subjective illusion or shortcoming. We cannot correct this problem then by learning to see what is there before us but hidden from our view. We must instead learn to read the absences existing in the very fullness of our vision.
– Darstellung then is the presentation in the form of value- by way of the value form- of abstract human labor as it is materialized in the body of the commodity. The relative form is nothing but the impossible identity of value to itself the void of its own inadequacy. Value must become something other, it must become the value thing that exists apart from its own value being.
– value cannot present itself in this opposition between exchange value and use value because it is not a property specific to the single commodity what a social relationship articulated through the whole commodity structure of which the single commodity is only one part. This structural causality can only operate because of the exceptional one, the commodity excluded from the structure of values. Existence of the structure can only be presented by an element excluded from itself.
– we have arrived at Marxist description of structural causality through the concept of presentation. Value is the effect of structure in that the structure presents itself, through the elaboration of the value form, as the articulation of homogeneous human labor power.
- Jameson’s Libidinal Apparatus
-The political unconscious is the picture developed their of some collective Unity of Consciousness. Only a collected Unity- weather that of a particular class, the proletariat, or of its organ of Consciousness, the Revolutionary party- can achieve the transparency required for the subject- here a collective social political subject- to be fully conscious of its determination by class and be able to square the circle of an illogical conditioning by sheer Lucidity and The Taking of thought. (PU 283)
-The political unconscious is not much concerned with the conditions of possibility of such Lucidity but rather with the mechanisms whereby we attempt to square the circle of 80 illogical limitation by projecting a world in which our actions and values would at an a seemingly Timeless and natural legitimacy, a process of wish-fulfillment that Jameson models on Freud’s development of that Concept in the interpretation of Dreams: figuration. If we are to become aware of class the classes already must be in some sense perceptible as such but this requirements can be fulfilled only when the social conditions of our daily lives had developed the point at which underline class structures become representable in tangible form.
–” the relationship between Class Consciousness and figurability in other words demand something more basic than abstract knowledge and implies a mode of experience that is more visceral and existential than the abstract certainties of economics and Marxian social science.”
-This visceral and existential motive experience is the demesne of culture where the classes have to take on the function of characters. In other words at the most basic level class Consciousness is always allegorical each class achieving figure ability to the extent to which it can represent it unconsciously through ART narrative and other idiot logical Productions as a character with its own particular qualities and personality. Figuration then is essentially a mode of allegorical personification.
– all interpretation is it base allegorical various interpretive models functioning not so much as theories per se but rather as unconscious structures and so many afterimages and secondary effects of a given historical mode of figuration. all allegorical methods are unconscious attempts to articulate a system for representing history.
– The political unconscious it should be remembered is ultimately the process of a figurative meditation on the destiny of community.
Historical – the ideology of form as a matrix of symbolic messages related to different coexisting modes of production
Social- The ideologeme as a unit in class discourse
political – Individual cultural object as a symbolic Act.
– figuration is necessary because the process of cultural revolution is not a positive empirically available event but rather a structural limitation on how we perceive ourselves and our relationship to the larger social totality that determines us.
– this search for ways of seeing whether conscious or unconscious is the process of cognitive mapping by which we obtained the figures necessary for locating ourselves in history.
– allegorical criticism does not so much interpret a given subject matter through the terms of another Master narrative- where interpretation is seen as the unearthing of some deeper meaning below the surface- as rewrites that subject matter in terms of a different code. Allegory is a process of diversion and reinvestment: the initial terms are diverted from their surface function into the service of other idiot logical functions in reinvested by what we have called the political unconscious.
– this process is not internal to me as an individual but is made possible by the objective figural apparatus available to me. In this way the text draws the real into its own texture as its imminent subtext but not as something external orange extrinsic to the text but something born within and vehicle ated by the text itself interiorized in it’s very fabric in order to provide the stuff on the raw material on which the textual operation must work.
– the literary work or cultural object brings into being that very situation to which it is also a reaction. it articulates its own situation and texture Eliza’s it there by encouraging and perpetuating the illusion that the situation itself did not exist before it that there is nothing but a text.
– ideologies is not something internal to individual consciousness what is an external effect of certain social practices that are displayed by staged by condensed in libidinal apparatuses.
-” it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the real in lacan. It is simply history itself”
– Lacanian split subject : The acquisition of language functions as a kind of primary repression, a repression of the imaginary logic of identification, which constitutes the subject as a divided, mediated by language because the subject can never coincide with the signifier that represents it. But binary logic of the imaginary is broken up by the introduction of this mediating third, the other, the unconscious, language itself.
– History is not a text not a narrative but an absent cause it is inaccessible to us except in textural form.
– language manages to carry the real within itself as its own intrinsic or imminent subtext.
– the literary work or cultural object brings into being that situation to which it is also add one in the same time or reaction.
– the difference between the sublime object for Kant and that for Hegel is that the sublime object for Kant is simply the phenomenal object that stretches are representative faculties beyond their limits while the sublime object for Hagel is the obscene embodiment of the nothing Beyond representation the embodiment of radical negativity. We experience the sublime when we come into contact with the miserable object through its it’s very wretchedness embodies this negativity.
– what unites the three levels is the concept of contradiction: at the first level the text functions as a symbolic act that seeks a figural resolution to some Unthinkable social contradiction. At the second level text functions as an ideologeme an utterance in the larger dialogue between contradictory class discourses and at the third level of the text functions as the ideological sedimentation at the level of form or genre itself of the larger process of cultural revolution, the ongoing contradictory process in which historical classes vie for hegemony.
– we cannot simply identify class types in novels because such a position treats class identification as an inert given line and tact outside the text where as the task is to show the textual reflection as constituent of the value of this outside as an allegorical process that produces alternatives to empirical history by emptying them of their finality Andrey orchestrating them in terms of some master fantasy structure of Phantasm.
– the real, this absent cause, which is fundamentally unrepresentable and non-narrative and detectable only in its effects, can be disclosed only by desire itself, whose wish-fulfilling mechanisms are the instruments through which this resistance surface must be scanned.
- Spivak
-A desire to touch the everyday. She does not desire to know what they think or to grasp their consciousness. The everyday and Consciousness operate according to different critical itineraries.
– is after a certain Poetics, a certain mode of putting together of a continuous seeming self for everyday life. This self which only seems continuous but has to seem as such for everyday functioning has been put together for such a seeming despite the chance Inus that may be reined in in the necessary production of this continuity.
