No More Learning

The essayistic nature of Fred- ric Jameson's short new book on G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit should not blind us to the fact that the book offers a system- atic interpretation of the entire inner structure of Hegel's first masterpiece. Although The Hegel Variations comes from someone for whom reading Hegel is like eating daily bread, the book is readable as an introduction to Hegel while simultaneously providing precise interpretive hints worthy of the greatest Hegel specialists. In this review, I limit myself to four varia- tions of my own, to four interven- tions into the book's key topics: Hegel and the critique of capitalism, the circle of positing presupposi- tions, Understanding and Reason, and the eventual limits of Hegel. Of course, the critical nature of some of my remarks is based on my great admiration of Jameson's work and on a shared solidarity in our struggle for the Hegelian legacy in Marx- ism. One should remember here the proverb that says only the highest peaks are struck by lightning.
? Criticism Spring 2011, Vol. 53, No. 2, pp. 295-313. ISSN 0011-1589. (C)2011 by Wayne State University Press Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
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I
Jameson is right to draw attention to the fact that, "despite his famil- iarity with Adam Smith and emer- gent economic doctrine, Hegel's conception of work and labor--I have specifically characterized it as a handicraft ideology--betrays
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? ? ? no anticipation of the originali- ties of industrial production or the factory system"--in short, Hegel's analyses of work and production cannot be "transferred to the new industrial situation" (68). There is a series of interconnected reasons for this limitation, all grounded in the constraints of historical experience at Hegel's disposal. First, Hegel's notion of industrial revolution was the Adam Smith-type manufac- ture where the work process is still that of combined individuals using tools, and not yet the factory in which the machinery sets the rhythm and individual workers are reduced de facto to organs serving the machinery, to its appendices.
Second, Hegel could not yet imagine the way abstraction rules in developed capitalism: when Karl Marx describes the mad self-en- hancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation reaches its apogee in today's metare- flexive speculations on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path dis- regarding any human or environ- mental concern is an ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that, behind this ab- straction, are real people and natural objects on whose productive capaci- ties and resources capital's circula- tion is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The prob- lem is that this "abstraction" is not only in our (financial speculator's)
misperception of social reality, but that it is "real" in the precise sense of determining the structure of the very material social processes: the fate of whole strata of population and sometimes of entire countries can be decided by the solipsistic speculative dance of capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in a blessed indifference with regard to how its movement will affect social reality. Therein resides the funda- mental systemic violence of capi- talism, much more uncanny than the direct precapitalist socio-ideo- logical violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete indi- viduals and their "evil" intentions, but is purely "objective," systemic, anonymous. Here we encounter the Lacanian difference between real- ity and the Real: reality is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, whereas the Real is the in- exorable "abstract" spectral logic of capital that determines what occurs in social reality. This gap is palpable in the way the economic situation of a country is considered to be good and stable by the international fi- nancial experts even when the large majority of people are living worse than before. Reality doesn't matter; what matters is the situation of capi- tal. . . . And, again, is this not more true today than ever? Do phenom- ena usually designated as those of virtual capitalism (future trades and similar abstract financial specula- tions) not point toward the reign
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? ? ? of real abstraction at its purest and much more radical than in Marx's time? In short, the highest form of ideology does not reside in getting caught up in ideological spectral- ity, ignoring its foundation in real people and their relations, but pre- cisely in overlooking this Real of spectrality and in pretending to ad- dress directly real people with their real worries. Visitors to the London Stock Exchange receive a free leaf- let explaining that the stock market is not about some mysterious fluc- tuations, but about real people and their products--this is ideology at its purest.
Here, in the analysis of the uni- verse of capital, one should not only project Hegel toward Marx, but Marx himself should be radical- ized: it is only today, in the postin- dustrial form of global capitalism, that, to put it in Hegelian terms, really existing capitalism reaches the level of its notion: perhaps, one should follow again Marx's old anti-evolutionist motto (inciden- tally, taken from Hegel) that the anatomy of man provides the key for the anatomy of a monkey; that is, to deploy the inherent notional structure of a social formation, one must start with its most developed form.
Capital is money that is no longer merely wealth, its univer- sal embodiment, but value that, through its circulation, generates more value--value that medi- ates or posits itself, retroactively
positing its own presuppositions. First, money appears as a mere means of exchanging commodities: instead of the endless bartering, one first exchanges one's product for the universal equivalent of all commodities, which can then be exchanged for any commodity that one may need. Then, once the cir- culation of capital is set in motion, the relationship is inverted, with the means turning into an end in itself; that is, the very passage through the "material" domain of use values (the production of commodities that sat- isfy individuals' particular needs) is posited as a moment of what is substantially the self-movement of capital itself. From that moment onward, the true aim is no lon- ger the satisfaction of individuals' needs, but simply more money, the endless repeating of the circulation as such. . . . This arcane circular movement of self-positing is then equated with the central Christian tenet of the identity of God the Fa- ther and his Son, of the Immaculate Conception by means of which the single father directly (without a female spouse) begets his only son and thus forms what is arguably the ultimate single-parent family.
Is then capital the true Subject/ Substance? Yes and no. For Marx, this self-engendering circular move- ment is--to put it in Freudian terms--precisely the capitalist un- conscious fantasy that parasitizes the proletariat as pure substanceless subjectivity; for this reason, capital's
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? ? ? speculative self-generating dance has a limit and brings about the conditions of its own collapse. Our everyday experience tells us that the ultimate goal of capital's circulation is the satisfaction of human needs, that capital is just a means to attain this satisfaction more efficiently. Then there is the notion of capi- tal as a self-engendering monster. In actuality, however, capital does not engender itself but exploits the worker's surplus value. There is thus a necessary third level to be added to the simple opposition of subjective experience (of capital as a simple means of efficiently satis- fying people's needs) and objective social reality (of exploitation): the objective deception, the disavowed unconscious fantasy (of the mys- terious self-generating circular movement of capital), which is the truth (although not the reality) of the capitalist process. Again, to quote Jacques Lacan, truth is structured like fiction: the only way to formu- late the truth of capital is to pres- ent this fiction of its "immaculate" self-generating movement. And this insight also enables us to locate the weakness of Jacques Derrida's "deconstructionist" appropriation of Marx's analysis of capitalism: although it emphasizes the endless process of deferral that character- izes this movement, as well as its fundamental inconclusiveness, its self-blockade, the deconstruction- ist retelling still describes the fan- tasy of capital--it describes what
individuals believe, although they don't know it.
What all this means is that the urgent task of the economic analy- sis today is, again, to repeat Marx's critique of political economy with- out succumbing to the temptation of the multitude of the ideologies of postindustrial societies. The key change concerns the status of private property: the ultimate ele- ment of power and control is no longer the last link in the chain of investments, the firm or indi- vidual who really owns the means of production. The ideal capitalist today functions in a wholly dif- ferent way: investing borrowed money, "actually owning" noth- ing, even indebted, but nonetheless controlling things. A corporation is owned by another corporation, which is again borrowing money from banks, which may ultimately manipulate money owned by or- dinary people like ourselves. With Microsoft's Bill Gates, the private property of the means of produc- tion becomes meaningless, at least in the standard meaning of the private property. The paradox of this virtualization of capital- ism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in elementary par- ticle physics. The mass of each el- ement in our reality is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of its movement; however, an electron's mass at rest is zero; its mass con- sists only of the surplus generated
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? ? ? by the acceleration of its move- ment, as though we are dealing with a nothing that acquires some deceptive substance only by magi- cally spinning itself into an excess of itself. Do today's virtual capital- ists not function in a homologous way? Their net value is zero; they directly operate with just the sur- plus, borrowing from the future.
The irony is not difficult to miss here: the fact that Marx needed Hegel to formulate the logic of capital (the crucial breakthrough in Marx's work occurred in the mid- 1850s, when, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, he started to read Hegel's Logic again) means that what Hegel wasn't able to see was not some post-Hegelian or postid- ealist reality of the properly Hege- lian aspect of capitalist economy. Here, paradoxically, Hegel was not idealist enough; that is, what he did not see was the properly speculative content of the capitalist specula- tive economy, the way the financial capital functions as a purely virtual notion processing "real people. "
Last but not least, the third critical point concerns the properly modern capitalist class struggle in its difference from traditional caste and feudal hierarchies: since Hegel's notion of domination was limited to traditional struggle be- tween master and servant, what he couldn't envisage was a relation- ship of domination that persists in a postrevolutionary situation (revo- lution, of course, refers here to the
bourgeois revolution doing away with traditional privileges) where all individuals recognize one an- other as autonomous free subjects. This prodigious social leveling of a modern democracy
certainly does not exclude the emergence of wealth and of profound distinctions be- tween rich and poor, even in the socialist countries. Nor is it in any way to be under- stood as the end of classes in their economic sense: there are still workers and man- agers in these societies, there are still profit and exploita- tion, reserve armies of the unemployed, and so on and so forth. But the new cul- tural equality . . . is infused with a powerful hatred of hierarchy and special privi- leges and with a passionate resentment of caste distinc- tions and inherited cultural superiority. It is permitted to be wealthy, so long as the rich man is as vulgar as everyone else. (101)
This is a situation that, one might add, opens up the unexpected pos- sibility of a genuinely proletarian reappropriation of the so-called high culture. All three of these cases seem to call for a Hegelian analysis: laborers reduced to an appendix of machinery; reality; and a hierar- chy persisting in the very form of
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? ? ? "plebeianization"--paradoxical re- versals that seem to give body to all the twists of the most sophisticated dialectic.
II
Jameson characterizes Understand- ing (Verstand), the "common-sense empirical thinking of externality, formed in the experience of solid objects and obedient to the law of non-contradiction" (119), as a kind of spontaneous ideology of our daily lives, of our immediate expe- rience of reality. As such, it is not merely a historical phenomenon to be dissolved through dialectical critique and the practical change of relations that engender it, but a permanent, transhistorical, fix- ture of our everyday reality. True, Reason (Vernunft) "has the task of transforming the necessary errors of Verstand into new and dialecti- cal kinds of truths" (119), but this transformation leaves intact the everyday efficiency of Understand- ing, its formative role in our ordi- nary experience. All Reason can do is a kind of Kantian critical de- limitation of the proper sphere of Understanding; that is, it only can makes us aware of how, in our daily lives, we are victims of necessary (transcendental) illusions. Under- lying this reading of the opposition of Reason and Understanding is a profoundly non-Marxian notion of ideology (or, rather, a profoundly
non-Marxian split of this notion) probably taken from Louis Al- thusser (and, maybe, Lacan). In a Kantian mode, Jameson seems to imply two modes of ideology: a his- torical one (forms linked to specific historical conditions that disappear when these conditions are abol- ished, like traditional patriarchy) and an a priori transcendental one (a kind of spontaneous tendency to identitarian thinking, to reifica- tion, etc. , that is cosubstantial with language as such, and that, for this reason, can be assimilated to the il- lusion of the big Other as the "sub- ject supposed to know").
Closely linked to this notion of ideology is Jameson's (rarely no- ticed, but all the more persistent) motif of the unsayable, of things bet- ter left unsaid. For example, in his review of my Parallax View (2006) in the London Review of Books, his argument against the notion of parallax is that, as the name for the most elementary split/diffraction, it endeavors to name something that is better left unnamed. In a similar way, Jameson subscribes to the Kantian tendency of (some of) today's brain scientists about the a priori structural unknowability of consciousness:
[W]hat Hegel's contempo- raries called the not-I is that which consciousness is con- scious as its other, and not any absence of consciousness it- self, something inconceivable
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? ? ? except as a kind of science- fictional picture-thinking, a kind of thought of otherness. But it is hard to understand how we could know some- thing without knowing what its absence entails: and it may well be, as Colin McGinn argues, that consciousness is one of those philosophical problems which human be- ings are structurally unfit to solve; and that in that sense Kant's was the right posi- tion to take: that, although its existence is as certain as the Cartesian cogito, con- sciousness must also remain perpetually unknowable as a thing-in-itself.
(32)
The least one can say about these lines is that they are profoundly non-Hegelian, even taking into ac- count Jameson's unexpected dialec- tical point: since an element can be properly grasped only through its difference to its opposite, and since the I's opposite--the not-I--is as inaccessible to the I as it is in-itself, the consequence of the unknow- ability of the not-I as it is in-itself, independently of the I, is the un- knowability of consciousness (the I) itself as it is in-itself. The stan- dard solipsist-empiricist point that the subject can only know itself, its sensations, is thus proven wrong: if the not-I is unknowable, the I itself suffers the same lot. The question to be raised here is this: Is this circle
inescapable? Are we caught in it to the end, so that every specula- tion about the outside is always already a retroactive fantasy from the standpoint inside, or, as Hegel would have put it, is every presup- position already posited?
Jameson develops this impossi- bility to break out in his perspicuous reading of the concept of positing as the key to what Hegel means by idealism. His first move is to dia- lectically mediate the very opposi- tion of positing and presupposing: The core of positing is not the direct production of objects, since such a production remains abstractly op- posed to what is simply given. (I as a finite subject finds in front of me material objects and then proceeds to positing by working on them. ) The core of positing concerns these presuppositions themselves--that is, what is primordially posited are presuppositions themselves. Recall Martin Heidegger's notion of the essence of modern technology as Gestell: in order for the subject to manipulate/exploit reality techno- logically, this reality has to be pos- ited/presupposed (or, as Heidegger puts it, disclosed) in advance as an object of possible technological exploitation, as a reserve of raw materials and energies, etc. It is in this sense that one should conceive what is posited "in terms of presup- positions: for positing somehow always takes place 'in advance' of other kinds of thinking and other kinds of acts and events" (27) or,
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? ? ? even more pointedly, "in terms of theatrical settings or pro-filmic arrangements, in which, ahead of time, a certain number of things are placed on stage, certain depths are calculated, and an op- tical center also carefully provided, the laws of perspective invoked in order to strengthen the illusion to be achieved" (28):
Kant's theory--phenomenon and noumenon--looks some- what different if it is grasped as a specific way of positing the world. . . . [I]t is no longer a question of belief: of taking the existence of objective re- ality, of the noumenon, of a world independent of human perceptions, on faith. But it is also not a question of follow- ing in Fichte's footsteps and affirming that objective real- ity--the noumenon, which has now become the not-I-- is summoned into being by the primal act of the I, which "posits" it (now using the term in a metaphysical sense).
Rather, that beyond as which the noumenon is characterized now becomes something like a category of thinking. . . . It is the mind that posits noumena in the sense in which its experi- ence of each phenomenon includes a beyond along with it. . . . The noumenon is not something separate from the
phenomenon, but part and parcel of its essence; and it is within the mind that realities outside or beyond the mind are "posited. " (29)
We should introduce here a pre- cise distinction between the presup- posed/shadowy part of what appear as ontic objects and the ontological horizon of their appearing. On the one hand, as it was brilliantly de- veloped by Edmund Husserl in his phenomenological analysis of per- ceptions, every perception even of an ordinary object, involves a series of assumptions about its unseen flip side, as well as of its background; on the other hand, an object always appears within a certain horizon of hermeneutic prejudices that pro- vide an a priori frame within which we locate this object and which thus make the object intelligible-- to observe reality without preju- dices means to understand nothing. This same dialectic of positing the presuppositions plays a crucial role in our understanding of history:
[J]ust as we always posit the anteriority of a nameless ob- ject along with the name or idea we have just articulated, so also in the matter of histor- ical temporality we always posit the preexistence of a formless object which is the raw material of our emer- gent social or historical ar- ticulation. (85-86)
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? ? ? This formlessness should also be understood as a violent erasure of (previous) forms: whenever a cer- tain act is posited as a founding one, as a historical cut, the beginning of a new era, the previous social real- ity is as a rule reduced to a chaotic ahistorical conundrum--say, when the Western colonialists "discov- ered" Black Africa, this discovery was read as the contact of "prehis- torical" primitives with civilized history proper, and their previous history basically blurred into form- less matter. It is in this sense that the notion of positing the presupposi- tions is "not only a solution to the problems posed by critical resistance to mythic narratives of origin . . . ; it is also one in which the emergence of a specific historical form retroac- tively calls into existence the hith- erto formless matter from which it has been fashioned" (87). This last claim should be qualified or, rather, corrected: what is retroac- tively called into existence is not the hitherto formless matter but, precisely, a matter that was well ar- ticulated before the rise of the new, and whose contours were blurred, became invisible, from the hori- zon of the new historical form-- with the rise of the new form, the previous one is (mis)perceived as "hitherto formless matter"; that is, the formlessness itself is a retroac- tive effect, a violent erasure of the previous form. (So what about the obvious counterargument: the abundance of ethnological studies
of these prehistorical societies, with detailed descriptions of their ritu- als, systems of kinship, myths, etc. ? The classic ethnology and anthropology were precisely stud- ies of "prehistoric" societies, studies that systematically overlooked the specificity of these societies, inter- preting them as a contrast to "civi- lized" societies. Recall how, in their description of the primitive myths of origin, the early anthropologists read, say, the statement that a tribe originates from the owl, as a literal belief ["They really believe their predecessors were owls"], totally missing the way such statements ef- fectively functioned. ) If one misses the retroactivity of such positing of presuppositions, one finds oneself in the ideological universe of evo- lutionary teleology: an ideological narrative thus emerges in which previous epochs are conceived as progressive stages/steps toward the present "civilized" epoch. This is why the retroactive positing of pre- suppositions is the materialist "sub- stitute for that 'teleology' for which [Hegel] is ordinarily indicted" (87). (Marx's aforementioned statement about the anatomy of man offer- ing the key to the anatomy of ape should be read in the same way: as the materialist reversal of teleologi- cal evolutionary progress. )
This Jamesonian account none- theless raises a number of critical points. Yes, presuppositions are (retroactively) posited, but the con- clusion to be drawn from this is not
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? ? ? that we are forever caught into this circle of retroactivity so that every attempt to reconstruct the rise of the New out of the Old is noth- ing but an ideological narrative. Hegel's dialectic itself is not yet an- other grand teleological narrative, but precisely the effort to avoid the narrative illusion of a continu- ous process of the organic growth of the New out of the Old. The historical forms that follow one another are not successive figures within the same teleological frame, but successive retotalizations, each creating (positing) its own past (as well as projecting its own future). In other words, Hegel's dialectic is the science of the gap between the Old and the New, of account- ing for this gap. More precisely, its true topic is not directly the gap be- tween the Old and the New, but its self-reflective redoubling--when it describes the cut between the Old and the New, it simultaneously de- scribes the gap, within the Old it- self, between the Old-in-itself (as it was before the New) and the Old retroactively posited by the New. It is because of this redoubled gap that every new form arises as a cre- ation ex nihilo: the Nothingness out of which the New arises is the very gap between the Old-in-itself and the Old-for-the-New, the gap that makes impossible the account of the rise of the New in the terms of a continuous narrative. (Marx him- self was aware of this gap when, in the last chapter of volume 1 of
Das Kapital, he used the narrative of "so-called primordial accu- mulation" to confront the cha- otic brutality of the actual rise of capitalism. )
One should add a further quali- fication here: what escapes our grasp is not the way things were before the arrival of the New, but the very birth of the New, the New as it was "in itself," from the perspective of the Old, before the New managed to posit its presuppositions. This is why fantasy, the phantasmatic nar- rative, always involves an impos- sible gaze, the gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the scene of its own absence--the illusion is here the same as that of alternate reality whose otherness is also posited by the actual totality, which is why it remains within the coordinates of the actual totality. The way to avoid this utopian re- duction of the subject to the impos- sible gaze witnessing an alternate reality, from which he is absent, is not to abandon the topos of alter- nate reality as such. Recall Walter Benjamin's notion of revolution as redemption through repetition of the past: apropos the French Rev- olution, the task of a true Marxist historiography is not to describe the events the way they really were (and to explain how these events generated the ideological illusions that accompanied them); the task is rather to unearth the hidden poten- tiality (the utopian emancipatory potentials) that were betrayed in
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? ? ? the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome (the rise of utilitarian market capitalism). The point of Marx is not primarily to make fun of the wild hopes of the Jacobins' revolutionary enthusiasm, to point out how their high emancipatory rhetoric was just a means used by the historical cunning of reason to establish the vulgar commercial capitalist reality; it is to explain how these betrayed radical-emancipa- tory potentials continue to insist as kinds of historical specters that haunt the revolutionary memory, demanding their enactment, so that the later proletarian revolu- tion should also redeem (put to rest) all of these past ghosts. These alternate versions of the past that persist in a spectral form constitute the ontological openness of the his- torical process, as was clear to G. K. Chesterton:
The things that might have been are not even present to the imagination. If some- body says that the world would now be better if Na- poleon had never fallen, but had established his Imperial dynasty, people have to ad- just their minds with a jerk. The very notion is new to them. Yet it would have pre- vented the Prussian reaction; saved equality and enlight- enment without a mortal quarrel with religion; uni- fied Europeans and perhaps
avoided the Parliamentary corruption and the Fascist and Bolshevist revenges. But in this age of free-thinkers, men's minds are not really free to think such a thought.
What I complain of is that those who accept the verdict of fate in this way accept it without knowing why. By a quaint paradox, those who thus assume that history al- ways took the right turning are generally the very people who do not believe there was any special providence to guide it. The very rational- ists who jeer at the trial by combat, in the old feudal or- deal, do in fact accept a trial by combat as deciding all human history. 1
In his less-known Everlasting Man (1926), Chesterton conducts a wonderful mental experiment along these lines, in imagining the monster that man might have seemed at first to the merely natu- ral animals around him:
The simplest truth about manisthatheisavery strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the exter- nal appearance of one bring- ing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair
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? ? ? advantage and an unfair dis- advantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fin- gers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the uni- verse hidden from the uni- verse itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which cre- ates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in na- ture, they remain in the same sense unique. 2
This is what Chesterton called thinking backwards: we have to put ourselves back in time, before the fateful decisions were made or before the accidents occurred that generated the state that now seems normal to us, and the royal way to
do it, to render palpable this open moment of decision, is to imagine how, at that point, history may have taken a different turn. (This, however, does not mean that, in a historical repetition in the radical Benjaminian sense, we simply re- turn in time to the open moment of decision and, this time, make the right choice. The lesson of repeti- tion is rather that our first choice was necessarily the wrong one, and for a very precise reason: the right choice is only possible the second time, after the wrong one; that is, it is only the first wrong choice that creates the conditions for the right choice. The notion that we might have made the right choice already the first time, and that we just ac- cidentally blew the chance, is a ret- roactive illusion. )
III
It is against this background that one can raise two further critical points about Jameson's notion of Understanding as an eternal and unsurpassable form of ideology. The first thing to note is that this unsurpassable character is in itself redoubled: first, there is Under- standing as the a priori tendency of human thinking toward iden- titarian reification; then, there is the unsurpassability of the circle of positing the presuppositions, which prevents us from stepping outside ourselves to grasp the not-I in all its
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? ? ? forms, spatial and temporal (from outside reality as our own histori- cal past is independent of us). The first critical point to be made here is that the features Jameson attributes to Understanding ("common-sense empirical thinking of externality, formed in the experience of solid objects and obedient to the law of non-contradiction") clearly are his- torically limited: they designate the modern/secular empiricist com- mon sense very different from, say, a primitive holistic notion of reality permeated by spiritual forces.
However, a much more impor- tant critical point concerns the way Jameson formulates the dichotomy between Understanding and Rea- son: Understanding is understood as the elementary form of analyzing, of drawing the lines of fixed dif- ferences and identities; that is, of reducing the wealth of reality to an abstract set of features.