Persistencies of the dialectic

three sites

Fredric Jameson

pp. 118-131

in: Bertell Ollman, Tony Smith (eds), Dialectics for the new century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

I have the feeling that for many people the dialectic (insofar as it means anything at all) means an adjunct or supplementary kind of thinking: a method, or mode of interpretation, which is only intermittently appealed to, and somehow only occasionally added on to our normal thought processes. This means that not many people are capable of thinking dialectically all the time, and it may also mean that the dialectic is not a form of thought generated by this particular kind of society, for which positivism, empiricism, and various other anti-theoretical traditions seem more congenial and appropriate. (It is of course a dialectical thought as such to suppose that the various social formations — or more precisely, modes of production — secrete forms of thinking and abstraction that are specific to them and functional within their own particular structures: a presupposition that does something to the "truth" of those various kinds of thinking that it would be best not to call relativistic, even though this dialectical or "absolute" relativism certainly has its kinship with other progressive contemporary relativisms.)