Reversals

Always historicize? What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal adverb "always"? It reminds me of the bumper stickers that instruct people in other cars to "Question Authority." Excellent advice, perhaps wasted on anyone who does whatever they're ordered to do by a strip of paper glued to an automobile!
-Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 125

I've always thought this remark of Sedgwick's demonstrates most concretely the misreading of "Jameson's Imperative" so very prevalent wherever his work is considered. The phrase "Always historicize!" is to be taken dialectically, as is clear from the opening of The Political Unconscious in which it first appears:

Always historicize! This slogan--the one absolute and we may even say "transhistorical" imperative of all dialectical thought--will unsurprisingly turn out to be the moral of The Political Unconscious as well.
-The Political Unconscious, 9

One is tempted, in the end, to rewrite Jameson's "we may even say" the other way around. For what gets missed by someone like Sedgwick is that this imperative is also "the one absolute." This means that we have to read such a statement as already expressing a contradiction. Thus the "always" is not to be seen as atemporal, and blindly used as "proof" that the motto's inconsistency is fatal to its integrity. Yet you see that this is what Sedgwick does, planted firmly as she is in the stance of reflection. Indeed, if we view things rightly, we see that Jameson calls it an imperative only in order to anticipate his anti-dialectical readers precisely on this point, to try and get them to actually think the contradiction (this is also why he uses transhistorical, in quotes). Instead, they bastardize the contradiction and act as if Jameson is accountable for it.

There's good reason, however, for this situation. One doesn't point at an inconsistency in the dialectic and say "Gotcha!" just because one takes it reflectively. Rather, it comes from a distrust in general concerning what we might call the dialectical reversal--that shift in emphasis caused by the turning of things into what they weren't supposed not to be. This reversal is, for Jameson, never an instance of something local multiplying relations, inflecting things slightly differently--however quietly it may occur. The tortuous paths that Hegel traces while turning quality into quantity may seem to involve extremely small points (how did we end up discussing gravity?), but these points never reverse things because they are local. Rather, the reversal occurs when something larger comes to force things to put up or shut up, to move towards definite closure--as Jameson always excellently puts it.

It is an intolerance of this sort of pressure from closure, of the totality bearing down on the instance, that then makes us avoid the reversal. Or, as Jameson would rather describe it, a general jadedness with respect to such massive structures--a belief in their irrelevance and even a feeling that they are not interesting, or only are interesting to moralists (who love their generalizations). Indeed, a sense that Jameson's writings are always heavyhanded, that they carry their lesson, seems to float around in discussions of him. We certainly see this in the quote from Sedgwick, who sticks him on that bumper. Personally, I find Jameson much lighter in tone than that.

It's rather those with the unconditional regard for the local who seem to me to couch things in moralistic terms (respect the particular!), in order to emphasize how something can ever have effects beyond the local context. Thus, it's no accident that Sedgwick invokes close reading at the end of that essay where she dismisses historicizing and advocates, instead, weak theory (a promising notion that I'll return to sometime):

What could better represent "weak theory, little better than a description of the phenomena which it purports to explain," than the devalued and near obsolescent New Critical skill of imaginative close reading?
-Touching Feeling, 145

There's the moralistic insistence that the focus which never goes beyond its immediate context is, paradoxically, obsolescent, tougher to do than it sounds, nearly impossible. It's no matter that close reading has from the beginning been "devalued," or rather an attempt to make such attention virtuous (as D.A. Miller rightly argues). Seen beside the dismissal of Jameson's "always," we see that close reading ends up as something like a mere refuge for those who distrust that total shift of emphasis.

At the same time, though, I wonder whether the reversal merits this distrust when dialectic becomes identified with something like what Zizek does. For while everyone seems to worry whether Zizek does violence to the object by ramming it through the dialectic, I'd rather take a Jamesonian stance and wonder whether the victim of Zizek's dialectic is the dialectic itself. Why? Though it reverses things, the dialectic doesn't take up whatever it finds and proceed to turn it around. Such a maneuver may be necessary to get the wheels going, but it amounts to the same thing, really, as "imaginative close reading" and stems from the same overemphasis on the particular--or inability to see the totality. The Frankfurt School did much to widen the gap between the local and the total, and provide many intermediaries--such as constellations--that could allow you to move more carefully from one to the other: Zizek would benefit from using them, because rather than imposing too much of something external on the content, his moves simply are not formal enough. This is why Jameson explains dialectic as something like forcing a closure--the reversal has to come from elsewhere and the effort to get there. And this is also why it doesn't resemble a shock or short-circuit (as Zizek calls it) so much as a different emphasis.