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Abstract
Georg Lukács’s notion of totality and its relation to the formation of revolutionary subjectivity has been heavily criticized by both Marxists and non-Marxists. Interrogating the critiques of totality elaborated by Lyotard, Althusser, Deleuze, and others, this essay aims to show that rather than constituting rejections of Lukácsian totality, these critiques elaborate a moment in the process of totalization as it is conceived by Lukács. Contrasting these critiques to Lukács’s writing, the essay develops a concept of immanent totality. The concept is used to argue that postmodern revenge movies, from the blaxploitation films of the 1970s to Tarantino’s films of the 2000s, unconsciously allegorize the totalizing process required for the production of a revolutionary subject. The analysis ends by suggesting that rather than trying to rid Marxist theorizing of a positive transcendent horizon, the challenge of revolutionary theory today resides in elaborating a positive revolutionary theory along Lukácsian lines.
Notes
1 See also Phillip Wegner’s (Citation2014) recent book on Jameson's work, in which he claims that Jameson's projects always have a totalizing horizon.
2 See, for example Jameson (Citation2009, 12–20).
3 On the relation between totality's systematicity and the dialectic, see Fredric Jameson (Citation2009, 15).
4 For a quick refutation of the facile identification of totality and totalitarianism, see Fredric Jameson (Citation1988, 347–60).
5 See, for example Jay (Citation1984, 102) and Žižek (Citation2000, 151).
6 Larsen draws on the work of Postone and Kurz to argue for a growing gap between actual labor and global surplus value production, which in turn makes the reduction of laborers to labor power marginal for the reproduction of capitalism.
7 The historical determinants of these earlier interventions should, however, alert us to the specificity of their interventions. If for Althusser it is the struggle over the de-Stalinization of the French Communist Party that makes urgent a rebellion against some reified idea of the proletariat, Mészáros's intervention is no less affected by the cold war. A better understanding of the relation of these interventions to their historical context is therefore needed before any recuperation of their positions.
8 Sartre's (Citation1990, 45–6) notion of totalization can be said to capture precisely this “secularization” of totality; in each, achieving mundane goals requires the totalization of past energies embodied in objects.
9 This “immanentist” reading of totality emphasizes the point of radical openness in Lukács's own writing. See, for example, Gail Day (Citation2011, 210–1).
10 This is not to say that the system forever remains inaccessible for Althusser. The scientific model that he elaborates—in which the different levels’ points of interaction and relative autonomy are studied—aims precisely at reconstructing totality.
11 For readings of Althusser that reaffirm his anti-Hegelianism, see Étienne Balibar (Citation1993) and Warren Montag (Citation1993). Jameson's (Citation1981) discussion of Althusser in his The Political Unconscious remains the most elaborate attempt to show that the Althusserian notion of structural determination in the mode of production is in fact not contradictory to the Hegelian-Marxist notion of totality.
12 It is important to note that this immanence of ideology in reality, or its objective necessity for the functioning of reality, neither slips into a claim of its cynical use nor makes this ideology a mere subjective belief.
13 Coffy depicts with much more detail the problems created for black solidarity by drug abuse, showing how drug lords are in fact on the side of white oppression, even when they help fund black politicians who declare war on drug abuse. It thus exposes the contradictions of what will later be called the “war on drugs.”
14 The relation between the social mapping enacted by the revenge fantasy and totality is not coincidental of course. In his writing about realism and the history of the novel, which we will not be able to explore here, Lukács (Citation1971, Citation1980) explicitly argues for the totalizing nature of realist social mapping.
15 These are by no means the only later representatives of the genre. Outside Tarantino's work, Memento is a particularly interesting instance, in which the revenge fantasy meets science fiction. In the literary landscape, Caren Irr's (Citation2014, 159–61) Toward the Geopolitical Novel contains a discussion of the relation between revolutionary fiction and revenge, which can be related to our discussion here—particularly in its claim that ideology is always a ploy for the avenger.
16 This is of true of many cinematic action heroes, most notably in kung fu movies in which the hero can rely on nothing but his bodily skills, or to a certain degree in Rocky, with its by now familiar montage of the protagonist's severe bodily disciplining to achieve his goal.
17 The concepts of affective and immaterial labor are elaborated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Citation2004, 108–9).
