No doubt that Jameson’s talk at the CUNY Graduate Centre will be watched by loads of people in the next few days. Here are a few critical notes that I’ve thrown together in the middle of the night immediately after watching.
Ok, some late night quick – and probably incomprehensible – critical notes on Jameson’s talk which is now rapidly doing the rounds – or at least a failed attempt to say something that isn’t some old-fashioned Marxy grievance (of which of course one might have many.) Of course I don’t really know much about utopian studies, but I’ll give it a go and maybe we can get a proper conversation going (where the old-fashioned Marxy grievances will be equally welcome.)
1) There’s something strange about the history being given: it is significant that Jameson will choose the wholly unsuccessful Fourierian Utopia against the Saint-Simonian one (which although it fell apart when the whole thing explicitly became a church and Enfantin went off to find a female messiah in Egypt, had some big effects on the 19th century.) I should probably say that my memory of this history is fuzzy because I last thought hard about it two Christmases ago when I read all the saint-simonian lectures while getting very stoned and quite drunk. And occasionally I try to think about it when I read The Arcades, but not very hard. Anyway, this omission is significant because precisely all of the complexities of finance capital – and particularly its relationship to the state – are not, as Jameson suggests, a product of neoliberalism etc, but instead are the afterlife of the Saint-Simonian project. That is, this must, I think, be posed as a question of the role of banks and finance capital in relation to the state that is formed as the second empire – and the attempt to imagine an integrated utopia in this form without also thinking about the relation of those utopias historically to financial instruments is deceptive.) That’s a complicated question and a complicated historiography I’m posing, because when Jameson talks about the renationalisation of the banks he underestimates, I suspect, something about how integrated utopias in this sense must think about debt and credit relations. Since the saint-simonians they envisage their futures (which was played out in France not only during the second empire but indeed through the third republic too through to WWI) in terms of an integration of any future future through credit relations. That is, he underestimates the inevitabe decoupling (or strictly privatisation) of credit systems that are really at the centre of the history and historiography of saint-simonian thought from the state that they claim to be able to integrate and perpetuate. I think one could probably find some criticism in Benjamin along this line – that these utopias do not escape what Benjamin calls a Schuldzusammenhang – a context of debt – but instead offer redemption only through redeeming and repeating cyclically within such a context. To be cheeky one might even think of Keynesian counter-cyclicals as the full capitalist rationalisation of the saint-simonians’ own historiography of alternating periods of order and disorder, here regulated by a fiscal credit imaginary that is able to fully integrate the future. That is, even in its most rationalised form, it is unable to realise what it imagines (as we see since the 1970s). That Keynes begins the his theorising with his Tract on Monetary Reform with its preface directed to the French state (God, it’s been years since I’ve read this so I don’t remember clearly) at the moment of the end of the saint-simonian dominance in banking is maybe a history worth fleshing out. You get the idea. It’s late at night.
2) I should continue in the trend of degeneracy of explosive slogans into advertising slogans, into bankruptcy – a line that started once with Breton’s “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all”, which by 2011 has become “Our feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit” and now I add my own, even lesser 2014 attempt, “utopia will be DISINTEGRATIVE and just or it will be fascist.” I am caught on the moment of Jameson’s lecture in which he talks about a moment of nihilism – about the people’s right to drug themselves into permanent oblivion. Might it not be interesting to pose against this a more radical, perhaps more serious thought: will people have the right to die? And what will those rights be like? Is the injustice in this situation not the dehumanising limit of all integrative utopias? See Adorno in the Meditations on Metaphysics on this question.
3) One last point that caught my attention. Jameson touches on the creation of a psychoanalytic bureaucracy that would at once suggest positions of employment for people in his utopia, and at the same time offer a universal group therapy (although one imagines such a group therapy would be totally alien to someone like Wilfred Bion!) Should I add my name to the list (Reich, then Adorno) in suggesting we go an look back at Freud’s Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. This is the point in Freud’s oeuvre where he considers an analytic of the psychical structures of the army, and maybe it’s worth saying just two things. Firstly any type of psychoanalytic group therapy aimed at sustaining an integrated utopia of the army would involve something quite the opposite of most therapy, that is, the mass weakening of egos. (we can have an argument of whether psychoanalytic treatments for narcissism exist and how that might interact with this question.) This is of course radically anti-Freudian, but then Jameson knows that when he would pick Rousseau on state-religion against what Freud says in The Future of an Illusion. Obviously the mass weakening of egos by a bureaucracy – even in the name of therapy – is a troubling position. This leads then to an account of what is meant by fetish in Jameson’s talk, which is something like the combination of what exists in Freud’s study of the leader and his ideal object. The question is this: is Jameson not unreasonably hopeful that the leader and the object stand opposed to any catastrophe that befalls civilisation rather than either identifying with it (regression in the psychoanalytic sense) or in fact instantiating it (fascism.)
Anyway, those are probably all too quickly vomited out to make any sense, but maybe we can have a discussion.