(Continuation from last issue)
In the meantime, Alberto Toscano lifts another corner of the global veil from another neglected but significant theorist, literary and political thinker, about whom he has done much to teach us about, namely Franco Fortini who found time in a busy and productive life to create a significant translation Faust in Italian. This is the context in which the debate he started was renewed in Italy Lukač, whose commentary on Faust I regret to have omitted from my chapter here. The debate revolves around the distinction between allegory and symbol, which has been followed elsewhere (my own reference was Coleridge) and which, like many apparently literary discussions (like the one mentioned above), turns out to be deeply political - the allegory represents everything artificial in the old regime, the symbolism represents the new, unadorned simple speech of the bourgeoisie. For Lukacs, therefore, the heterogeneity of Faust II is clearly an intellectual inconvenience, since he chose Goethe for the supreme representative of that humanistic bourgeoisie worthy of being "inherited" by humanistic socialism. But, for him, humanism could be found in a symbol, or a "concrete universal", rather than in the extravagances of Goethe's late spectacle. Lukács opts for the position that Goethe's allegorical outbursts reflect the transitional nature of the 18th century, which unevenly develops into bourgeois secularism: his modern Italian commentators turn the wheel and see these "flaws" as prophetic symptoms of a new social order: something that Lukács himself unconsciously felt, using, on the very first page of his comment, the keyword "incomparable".
Incomparability is really the key here. Our recent theoretical (may I say, postmodern?) development trends are characterized by the emergence of a new dogma - that of heterogeneity and gap, interruption, cutting, such a subtle inner distance, difference rather than identity and continuity (or homogeneous time), and it could to delve further into higher metaphysical dimensions Altiserove rebellion against Lukáč's humanism, and finally, in the domain that interests us here, in the aversion to the symbol and the hegemony of metaphor.
The 18th century - the age of the bourgeois revolution, the great transition towards industry and capitalism - is a happy hunting ground for those who, like Mana Pole, had an eye for heterogeneity and especially for the problems it posed for any type of periodization (which itself is counted among the poorly homogeneous concepts that the new type of thinking wanted to replace). That is why I think it is appropriate to dwell for a moment on another reaction to my book, an extremely useful review Frank Moreti in which he notes that Goethe's chapter is the only one which does not even allude to that background question of the mode of production, so dear to all orthodox Marxist critics. The absence would seem to confirm the diagnosis I made above, that not only is the eighteenth century a key problem for periodization, but that concepts like "transition" are uniquely suspect in the first place. As I remain committed to the notion of mode of production, I will therefore admit that I had something similar in mind; but I seem to have suggested it so shyly and discreetly that it has become almost invisible. This, then, is my humble proposal: to invent, for the well-known second feudalism or absolute monarchy, a new concept of periodization that we could call "enlightened absolutism" in which enlightenment itself could be seen as "loyal opposition" within the state ( like social democracy today), a whole period in which rational bureaucracy, world philology, monetary and agricultural reforms, Enlightenment patronage of the arts, Encyclopédies and philosophers, criticism of religion and hopes for dynastic succession - all this constitutes what could be called the "long XVII century ” from the accession to the throne Louis XIV until the revolution of 1830. If so, this would not only shed new (and more dubious) light on the now monarchist American constitution; it would rather reorganize the heterogeneity of the XNUMXth century itself as the first, secularizing phase of capitalism and change the valence of Goethe's "conservatism".
But I refrain from further speculation of that type here, except to decry their seeming disregard for the contradictions between the political and economic levels, and to acknowledge the welcome establishment of another kind of political category Daniel Hartli - categories of political subject, citizen, institutional subjectivity - which my work seems to consistently ignore. Indeed, comrades whom I respect and admire have often lamented what they felt was an absence of politics as such in my work, and a complete disregard for Machiavelli, Gramsci, Foucault, Balibar in it, and even for the political dimension itself Hegel. Hartley keenly identifies the connection between this absence and the interest in impersonality and depersonalization which is the theme of my literary criticism and which I fear I share with all that "structuralist" aversion to "philosophy of the subject" which he is probably too young to have experienced. . Existentialism, with its idea of impersonal consciousness behind "personal" or self-consciousness (see Sartre Transcendence of the ego), enabled me to solve this problem in a satisfactory way, in contrast to the open anti-subjectivism of the post-structuralists. But he is absolutely right when he suggests that the construction of the subject or self it demands a place in any ontology of the present that my work claims to offer. In any case, he himself makes a valuable contribution to that program, which may have been curtailed by the feelings people have today, in the world of globalized monopoly, about the impotence of individuals and the futility of action.
In fact, I suspect that, under these circumstances, the displacement of ethics and individual psychology into psychoanalysis is itself a significant symptom. The chapter should be read in this context Clint Burnham, which my interpretation Hamlet subjects it to the Lacanian view, refreshing it with its incomparable virtuosity in its use Greimasovog semiotic square. I was certainly impressed by the way he (as an analyst) diagnoses Freud i Marx in terms of the classic Lacanian dualism of hysteria and obsessive-compulsive neurosis. Perhaps this opposition could encourage us to diagnose the very dichotomy of base and superstructure, with a little Delezovog spice: the superstructure would then be neurotic, while the base would be psychotic and paranoid (unless the other way around). Anyway, fortunately or unfortunately, lacan is our Hegel (or perhaps we should say, he is the only Hegel we have), in the sense that otherness is incorporated into his system, and the bourgeois ideological opposition between "individual" and "society" is thus rejected. However, I do not look at this in the sense of the aforementioned frequently criticized Freudo-Marxisms, nor in the framework of the anthropology of culture and personality; I will limit myself here to the view according to which Lakan, with Seminar XI and by turning to drive, he enters the ranks of post-structuralist thinkers of the end of the "center of the subject" that I mentioned above.
I left the most critical articles for the end, those Gabriel Pedula (Gabriele Pedulà) i Read Kler La Berž (Leigh Claire La Berge), which raise problematic questions about periodization itself: the first asks whether the theoretical re-emergence of allegory has anything to do with postmodernism, while the second raises the even broader question of what allegory has in common with periodization (and narrative) in general. . The problem of dialectics, as expected, appears here, as well as that of neoliberalism as the "inevitable horizon" of our thinking today in late capitalist postmodernity. These are fundamental questions, ones that we know are fundamental because we spend time trying to avoid or forget them (postcriticism and posttheory are just one way to achieve this).
I will make one observation - about representation - before adding a short speculative note to these, for now, unanswered questions. I think of the modern period as the one in which the problem of representation - more precisely, the impossibility of representation, either of a social totality or of a non-existent "self" (in other words, the structural inability of language to achieve either) - was first discovered (along with the existence of the thing called capitalism itself ). This is the moment in which Hegel expected philosophy to take the place of art in the struggle with the Absolute (the famous or infamous "end of art"). How is it Ornament noticed, that did not happen, but it turned out that that moment (and the completion of Hegel's system) turned out to be the end of philosophy. Instead, art itself, in the form of modernism, took on the problem of the Absolute, which is actually the problem of representation. But the modernists - from Wordsworth do Dostoyevsky, od George Eliot do Joyce, od Unarmed do Pound i Eisenstein - they thought they could make the Absolute appear by way of enormous formal innovations.
Postmodernism faced the same dilemmas and impossibilities of representation, but registered the universal failures of modernism in the form of their ruins and their translation into so many commodities. What were anxiety-filled laboratories in the modern period have now become amusing clichés and nostalgic allusions, and the Absolute is recognized as a human construct; in fact, everything is slowly revealed as a construct: a monumental building, designed by architects, passes into the hands of engineers, who were much less pious and ambitious than their modernist predecessors.
We are still deep in postmodernism (the third or globalized stage of capitalism), but the older initial postmodernism of the late 70s and early 80s has undoubtedly been replaced by other styles, and more generally by the recognition of capitalism as a horizon and narrative as an inevitable construct. I guess we now realize that anything can be a narrative, but that multiple narrative options don't necessarily mean relativism. Behind the various historical narratives may lie a deeper reality of the multiple historical breaks upon which they are based; and, indeed, ultimately, the contradictions that constitute their situation and their foundation.
The four levels form a kind of closure or outer boundary for those narratives and interpretations, however relativistic they may seem at first glance. (I should probably add, by the way, that for me the closed/open distinction represents classic Cold War ideology and should be abandoned along with some of the other automatic ideological oppositions of the period.)
But when I finished this book, I didn't really have an answer to the question - why four? And how are your levels different from Goldmann's homology, except there are more of them? Now I have an answer and I want to briefly outline this solution in conclusion. Each level must be understood as an opposition, not as a theme. Contradictions are binary oppositions, and so the opposition I mentioned a moment ago, closed versus open, would be a good example that is not resolved by "synthesis". But each level is an expression of that contradiction in its own domain: thus there are closed and open societies (political level), there is Fordist versus flexible production at some economic level, just as there is a centered subject and multiple positions of the subject, or Ekovo closed versus open artwork. Each of them expresses a "contradiction" in its local reality and its local idiom or idiolect, so that their sequence appears as different thematic sets.
But now we must pay more careful attention to our terminology and limit the word "contradiction" to each individual level. Now it is the kinship between these various contradictions that we wish to treat theoretically in a less mechanical way than does the parallelism of homology. (Of course, there may be contradictions between the different levels per se, but that's material for a more advanced course!)
Therefore, I will now introduce a new terminology, categories. Categories are known entities, Aristotel nine or ten of them are listed in Metaphysics and in other places: who, what, why, when, etc. Lace then, in an amazing pre-semiotic or pre-Greimasian idea, he groups them into four complementary packages and places them in a circular motion. However, Hegel expands them enormously into a quasi-evolutionary process of dynamic and self-transcending forms that make up the Greater Logic.
What we must remember in all of this is that in the Greek "category" means dilemma or obstacle. It is an antinomy, not a contradiction, that which interferes with conceptual thought, that which resists thought, let alone expression. These categories represent the inevitable epistemological failure of human endeavour, collective as well as individual: but these failures are historical, and we have the example of Hegel to show how a contradiction (or failure) can be historically overcome by expanding into a more comprehensive contradiction or failure (this is what is called productive, invigorating pessimism!).
The point is that a given historical moment is always characterized by a fundamental limitation in the form of what we have called a category. The levels, the forces of different contradictions, are the different forms projected by that basic category or antinomy. Within each of these levels, we have at our disposal an instrument of analysis, the Greimas square, which builds on the tension between Relation and Synonymy: that is, it distinguishes different forms of difference at the same time as its individual terms, through their variations, modulate across multiple linguistic areas (anticipating thus the multitude of levels themselves).
However, the problem remains that of the ultimate relationship of the different levels to that basic dilemma or impossibility which is the category itself. The difference is, of course; but the difference between individual levels is an entirely different kind of difference than that between levels and their underlying category (however historical that may be).
This is a problem that cannot be solved, as we have suggested, by parallelisms and homologies; nor can it be rejected by the correct postmodernist tendency to accept a mere multiplicity of unrelated differences. Are we then returning to Kant's old dilemma, where the category becomes a thing in itself or an unknowable noumenon, and levels are phenomena that are the only ones available, conceptualized and representable for us? An idealist solution would understand the levels as so many manifestations or "emanations" of the basic antinomy; the existential requirement then also obliges us to recognize the incommensurability of the levels themselves. The most difficult task, however, is that which confronts any true materialism which seeks to understand the way in which the category shows "how matter acts upon men" (Benjamin) and tries to do it historically: what an unfinished business!
(Glyph editorial office; Source: historicalmaterialism.org; Translation: Danilo Lučić)
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