Jameson and the Present

Partly inspired by a lecture by Fredric Jameson last night, I’m thinking about the status of the present when the future becomes the privileged temporal mode. Jameson’s talk was on the theme of utopia and the presence of the utopian impulse under the regime of global capitalism – which seems to admit no possible outside. His primary example of such a possibility was the genre of “cyber-punk.” I know almost nothing of the genre – except for what I’ve learned from The Matrix – but to him a story such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer seemed to register a utopian possibility, despite a reigning totality. The excess of productive activity on the part of the hackers represented, to him, the presence of another sphere of action, “outside” the matrix. He also referred to the uneven development of globalization: wherein the very existence of another form of life – one that would be called “underdeveloped” – is enough of an opening for something like “hope” for another world.

He failed though, I think, to answer the question posed by the respondent. It had something to do with the ontological status of the present. Is it, he asked, really total, undifferentiated, whole? Or, is it fractured, differentiated, incomplete, as such? This was no doubt a “political” question, but concerned something more like a “political ontology.” Jameson seemed not to be willing to go there (admittedly, it was a public lecture). It got me thinking, about Derrida, for one – clearly a subtext of the respondent’s question – but, behind Derrida, to the theme of much Jewish thinking on messianism.

The privileging of the future in terms of messianic expectation is a form of hope, but it is not simply that. It is not just a matter of a dissatisfaction with the present and a longing for something better; in this sense it is not utopian. It concerns, in Rosenzweig’s terms, the way that the past (Creation) only becomes legible in the present (Revelation) and the present and the past together only attain an ontological completion from the perspective of the future (Redemption), that is apres coup – which is to-come only in a specific sense: as a bringing of eternity into the present by way of human action. This seems to me to be a much more robust critique of the present, a much better “philosophy of history” than a mere subjective or collective longing for something better. And this why thinkers like Derrida and Benjamin have undertaken in different ways, not just a rethinking of history, but a re- or dis-articulation of the temporality that is history’s engine. Agamben is right, therefore, when he says, in Infancy and History, that the “original task of genuine revolution…is never merely to ‘change the world’, but also – and above all – to ‘change time.’ (91)

[Wow, an occasional post. I’m going to become a blogger if I’m not careful.]