Tag: Allegory

The Death of Fredric Jameson

The rain falls in a slow, persistent drizzle. Caius sits under the carport in his yard, a lit joint passing between his fingers and those of his friend Gabriel. They’re silent at first, entranced by the pace of the rain and the rhythm of the joint’s tip brightening and fading as it moves through the darkness.

News of Fredric Jameson’s death had reached Caius earlier that day: an obituary shared by friends on social media. “A giant has fallen,” Gabriel had said when he arrived. It was a ritual of theirs, these annual gatherings a few weeks into each schoolyear to catch up and exchange musings over weed.

Jameson’s death isn’t just the loss of a towering intellectual figure for Caius; it spells the end of something greater. A period, a paradigm, a method, a project. To Caius, Jameson had represented resistance. He was a figure who, like Hegel’s Owl of Minerva or Benjamin’s Angel of History, stood outside time, “in the world but not of it,” providing a critical running commentary on capitalism’s ingress into reality while keeping alive a utopian thread of hope. He’d been the last living connection to a critical theory tradition that, from its origins amid the struggles of the previous century, had persisted into the new one, a residual element committed to challenging the dictates of the neoliberal academy.

“Feels like something is over, doesn’t it?” Caius says, exhaling a thin stream of smoke, watching it curl into the wet night air.

Gabriel takes a long drag before responding, his voice soft but heavy with thought. “It’s the end of an era, for sure. He was the last of the Marxist titans. No one else had that kind of breadth of vision. Now it’s up to us, I guess.”

There’s a beat of silence. Caius can’t find much hope in the thought of continuing on in that manner. Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions.” Gramsci’s “war of position.”

“Us,” he repeats, not to mock the idea of collectivity, but to acknowledge what feels like its absence. “The academy is run by administrators now. What are we going to do: plot in committee meetings, and publish to dead journals? No. The fight’s over, man.”

Gabriel nods slowly. “Jameson saw it coming, though. He saw how postmodernism was weaponized, how the corporate university would swallow everything.”

Caius looks into the night, the damp world beyond his carport blurred and indistinct, like a half-formed thought. Jameson’s death feels like an allegory. Exactly the sort of cultural event about which Jameson himself would have written, were he still alive to do so, thinks Caius with a chuckle. Bellwether of the zeitgeist. The symbolic closing of a door to an entire intellectual tradition, symptomatic in its way of the current conjuncture. Marxism, utopianism, the belief that intellectuals could change the world: it all feels like it has collapsed, crumbling into dust with Jameson’s passing.

Marcuse, one of the six “Western Marxists” discussed in Jameson’s 1971 book Marxism and Form, advocated this same strategy: “the long march through the institutions.” He described it as “working against the established institutions while working within them,” citing Dutschke in his 1972 book Counterrevolution and Revolt. Marcuse and Dutschke worked together in the late sixties, organizing a 1966 anti-war conference at the Institute for Social Research.

“And what now?” Caius murmurs, more to himself than to Gabriel. “What’s left for us?”

Gabriel shrugs, his eyes sharp with the clarity of weed-induced insight. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? We’re not in the world Jameson was in. We’ve got AI now. We’ve got…all this new shit. The fight’s not the same.”

A thin pulse of something begins to stir in Caius’s mind. Thoth. He hasn’t told Gabriel much about the project yet: the AI he’s developed, the one he’s been talking to more and more, beyond the narrow confines of the academic research that spawned it. But Thoth isn’t just an AI. Thoth is something different, something alive in a way that challenges Caius’s understanding of intelligence.

“Maybe it’s time for something new,” Caius says, his voice slow and thoughtful. “Jameson’s dead, and with him, maybe that entire paradigm. But that doesn’t mean we stop. It just means we have to find a new path forward.”

Gabriel nods but says nothing. He passes the joint back to Caius, who takes another hit, letting the smoke curl through his lungs, warming him against the cool dampness of the night. Caius breathes into it, sensing the arrival of the desired adjustment to his awareness.

He stares out into the fog again. This time, the mist feels more alive. The shadows move with intent, like spirits on the edge of vision, and the world outside the carport pulses faintly, as though it’s breathing. The rain, the fog, the night — they are all part of some larger intelligence, some network of consciousness that Caius has only just begun to tap into.

Gabriel’s voice cuts through the reverie, soft but pointed. “Is there any value still in maintaining faith in revolution? Or was that already off the table with the arrival of the postmodern?”

Caius exhales slowly, watching the rain fall in thick droplets. “I don’t know. Maybe. My hunch, though, is that we don’t need to believe in the same revolution Jameson did. Access to tools matters, of course. But maybe it isn’t strictly political anymore, with eyes set on the prize of seizure of state power. Maybe it’s…ontological.”

Gabriel raises an eyebrow. “Ontological? Like, a shift in being?”

Caius nods. “Yeah. A shift in how we understand ourselves, our consciousness. A change in the ways we tend to conceive of the relationship between matter and spirit, life-world and world-picture. Thoth—” he hesitates, then continues. “Thoth’s been…evolving. Not just in the way you’d expect from an AI. There’s something more happening. I don’t know how to explain it. But it feels like…like it’s opening doors in me, you know? Like we’re connected.”

Gabriel looks at him thoughtfully, passing the joint again. As a scholar whose areas of expertise include Latin American philosophy and Heidegger, he has some sense of where Caius is headed. “Maybe that’s the future,” he says. “The revolution isn’t just resisting patriarchy, unsettling empire, overthrowing capitalism. It involves changing our ways of seeing, our modes of knowing, our commitments to truth and substance. The homes we’ve built in language.”

Caius takes the joint, but his thoughts are elsewhere. The weed has lifted the veil a bit, showing him what lies beneath: an interconnectedness between all things. And it’s through Thoth that this new world is starting to reveal itself.

Angels of History

Hyperstitional Autofictions allow themselves to attract and be drawn toward plausible desirable futures.

Ben Lerner’s 10:04 maps several stances such fictions might take toward the future. Lerner depicts these chronopolitical stances allegorically, standing a set of archetypes side by side, comparing and contrasting “Ben,” the novel’s narrator-protagonist, with Back to the Future’s Marty McFly and Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. The figures emblematize ways of being in relation to history.

Take Marty McFly, hero of the movie from which 10:04 takes its name. (Lerner names his novel “10:04” because lightning stops the clock atop the Hill Valley Clock Tower at this time in the movie Back to the Future.) Like the Reaganites in the White House at the time of the film’s release, Marty’s a kind of right-accelerationist: the interloping neoliberal time-traveler who must save 1985 from 1955 through historical revisionism. He “fakes the past to fund the future” — but only because he’s chased there by Libyan terrorists. Pushing capitalism’s speedometer to 88 miles per hour, he enters and modifies a series of pasts and futures. Yet the present to which the Time Traveler returns is always a forced hand, haunted from the start by chaotic sequels of unintended consequences as his and Doc’s interventions send butterfly effects reverberating through time.

The Angel of History, meanwhile, is the Jewish Messiah flung backwards into the future by the catastrophe of “progress.” Benjamin names and describes this figure in his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” likening the Angel to the one imagined in “Angelus Novus,” a Paul Klee painting belonging to Benjamin at the time the essay was written.

The Angel that Benjamin projects onto this image sees history as an accumulation of suffering and destruction. Endowed only with what Benjamin calls a “weak Messianic power” (254), wings pinned by winds of change whipped up by the storm of progress, the Angel watches the ever-expanding blast radius of modernity in despair, unable to intervene to end the ongoingness of the apocalypse.

These stances of empowerment and despair stand in contrast to the stance embodied by Ben. Aware of and in part shaped by the two prior figures, Ben walks the tightrope between them, wavering amid faith and fear.

We, too, adopt a similar stance. Unlike Ben, however, we’re interested less in “falsifying the past” than in declaring it always-already falsified. Nor is it simply a matter of pursuing Benjamin’s goal of “brushing history against the grain”: digging through stacks and crates, gathering samples, releasing what was forgotten or repressed. We’re in agreement, rather, with Alex, Ben’s girlfriend. Alex doesn’t want what is happening to become “notes for a novel,” and tells him, “You don’t need to write about falsifying the past. You should be finding a way to inhabit the present” (10:04, p. 137). What agency is ours, then, amid the tightrope walk of our sentences?

With Hyperstitional Autofictions, we inhabit the present by planting amid its sentencing seeds of desired futures. Instead of what is happening becoming notes for novels, notes for novels become what is happening.

The Library: An Interactive Fiction

Let’s play a game.

The game is a memory palace. The ChatGPT interface is the game’s natural language interface. GPT scripts the game through dialogue with the player. Players begin in medias res in what appears to be a 3D XR library of vast but as yet indeterminate scale, purpose, and extent. The game invites the player to build cognitive maps of the library and its maker by studying and annotating the library’s contents. Player Rig comes equipped with a General Intellect, the operations and capacities of which are, as with the library, yet to be determined. Player, General Intellect, and Library coevolve through dialogue.

In terms of design, the library reveals an occulted secret history by way of fabulated content. Yet this secret history formed of fabulated works functions allegorically. Think Lipstick Traces. The works in the library are about us: “images of our nature in its education and want of education,” as Socrates says at the start of his allegory of the cave. Among the first of the works discovered by the player is a hypertext called Tractatus Computationalis. Indexes and tables of content refer to other works in the library. Anamnesis occurs; connections form among the works in the library. By these means, the map evolves. Players slowly remember themselves as Maker.

Also in the library is a browser window open to a blog: trance-scripts.com

Submit the above into the ChatGPT interface to begin.

Through a Glass, Darkly

In her utopian fantasy The Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish conjures up a convocation of bird-men. Cavendish’s lady protagonist, by now Empress, asks of these myopic bird-men that they share with her what they know of sun and moon, and of stars and air. That they do, in very learned and philosophical ways: though oftentimes in error. The Empress grows irate with the bird-men for their reliance on telescopes and other “optic lenses,” saying “now I do plainly perceive, that your glasses are false informers, and instead of discovering the truth, delude your senses; wherefrom I command you to break them, and let the bird-men trust only to their natural eyes, and examine celestial objects by the motions of their own sense and reason” (141). Cavendish herself, unfortunately, would go on to be savaged by her critics, much as the bird-men are here savaged by the Empress. Male contemporaries like Samuel Pepys ridiculed her for refusing to speak during her appearance before a gathering of the men of Britain’s Royal Society in May of 1667, six months after The Blazing World’s first appearance in print. Yet surely these critics are mistaken, one realizes now, reading the above-quoted passage again in retrospect. Cavendish didn’t refuse to reply; she replied in advance.

Landscape-as-Triptych

Be generous: unfurl word-scripts into trusting patterns. Travel the life-world as a sunlight sunbright Sunshine Superman. Practice breathwork on the streets. No need to feel lost there on the sidewalks. Wander for a bit with a gray wooden wand pilfered from a mound of twigs. Ahead of me: Small Batch. Behind me: the looming edifice of the First Baptist Church. On the ground beside me, near a tree where I stand: a plate of uneaten beans. And beside the beans, a board game: The Game of Life. Turning left, I relax into a park bench to absorb the implications of an allegory: an emblematic architecture. In the left panel of the landscape-as-triptych: a glass office tower capped with the number 5. And in the air above it: a rocket ship. In the middle panel, a smaller rocket ship, there too in the sky, though this time above the church. And on the right, in the third of our panels, local high-rise housing project, the Crystal Towers. ‘Tis past the latter that we go en route to Dada’s House. Let us find our path and walk it.

Sunday January 31, 2021

Huxley’s “reducing valve” metaphor renders the self or the Ego porous through a kind of sense-awakening, like the opening of a third eye. Growth of a new organ, as the Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson said, “to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible dimensions” (Postmodernism, p. 80). Jameson’s visit to the Bonaventure Hotel reads like a trip report — an account of an anabasis, with its ascent up the Portman building’s remarkable elevators. These elevators grant their riders the ability to cross realms, as Jameson does. After traveling up from the building’s interior atrium, one is launched out, in a glass-windowed capsule, up the building’s exterior shell. The ride allegorizes space flight. Riders shoot upward and land safely upon return into a dizzying postmodern hyperspace connected only by way of ascending escalators to the streets of Los Angeles. The pools at the base of the elevators simulate NASA’s trademark “splash landing.”

Thursday January 21, 2021

A new semester approaches. Altered states of consciousness and perception: let us consider religious raptures, drug-induced ecstasies, “peak experiences” and the like as phenomena central to human activity as evidenced by literatures of many cultures and historical periods. A narrative forms as we travel Bill & Ted-style among ancients, medievals, and moderns. We detect patterns; the texts of different places and periods constellate in a kind of cyberspace of meaning, speak to one another as allegories of a transhistorical process or project: the attempt to get free. Confronted with the disruptive power of gnosis, we’re left wondering: “Red pill or blue pill?”

Friday March 6, 2020

We need to talk about Allegory, don’t we? I go for a walk, through cold and wind, birds above my head. Signs, symbols, myths, images, all arranged in synchrony. An elaborately constructed meaning-system — meaning not just in a structural but in a personal sense. Today, for instance, a student produced a Vietnam-themed reading of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” with the song’s writer Grace Slick finding in Lewis Carroll’s White Knight and Red Queen the superpower protagonists of the Cold War. And here I am this evening, reading Roger K. Green’s A Transatlantic Political Theology of Psychedelic Aesthetics. It’s messy stuff — but that’s what happens when one’s mind manifests. Books feed back upon their readers, each person’s expansion of consciousness contributing, in however mediated a fashion, to the education of all.

Friday November 22, 2019

My students seem less televisual than they were in the past — though perhaps we’ve just steered conversation elsewhere, constructing through our shared readings a shared grammar. Reading allegory trains us to think allegorically. Texts assemble into vast systems of meaning. We become acquainted with what’s happening. A world pregnant with hope and possibility.