Dialectics: As Opposed to What?

Looking back at Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious (I'm working with the selection in Norton's Theory and Criticism) the issue of the utility of Marxist dialectic comes up.

Jameson argues that "the perspectives of Marxism as necessay preconditions for adequate literary comprehension" (Norton 1941). Since he does not qualify this, I must him to mean that the statement is true regardless of what the understanding may be adequate to, regardless of the historical context. He does not seem to have slipped, either: at the very beginning of his preface, one finds, "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. So Jameseon would have us treat this as a bona fide universal.

Despite the rich history of Marxist analysis, this approach bears difficulties in its initial conception, in part because opposition in the sense that Hegel used the term does not happen between objects.

For one thing, the assembly of an opposition requires at least a third value, that of a normal "between" them. The dichotomy of opposition, therefore, not only can never be absolute, but can never properly be dichotomy. If we say that ice opposes fire because the one is cold, the other hot, and we decide that in some sense the ice is it's cold and the fire is its heat, we still must assume a third value, in this case a range of temperature we find normal. Were we to posit normal at zero degrees kelvin, both fire and the ice in my drink are hot.

Another difficulty, perhaps deeper, comes from the issue of materiality. Surely some sharp student was bound to stand old George Wilhelm Friedrich on his head, but we shouldn't have been surprised if a few things rolled out of the man's pockets. Marx and Fuerbach would have their dialectics material, but that might not be so simple as willing it so. Opposition itself requires a third value to define because it is ideal, not material.

This may not be self-explanatory. Opposition is opposition ofqualities, and qualities are not objects, not material. They may be qualities we apply to objects or understand of objects, but they are not objects themselves. Therefore heat may oppose cold, given a normal temperature in between, but a proletariat cannot oppose a bourgeoisie in the same way, even though they battle mightily over conflicting interests.

There's more than semantics here. A given proletariat or bourgeoisie of which I speak is a group of variant individuals whom I have grouped for characteristics I hold them to share, and for that matter, not all characteristics, but only those that appear to me relevant to a given issue. Of course, the characteristic is something I apply to them based on a standard I have abstracted from experience. The results of their interaction may involve active response between any distinctions that may happen, not just oppositions.

Again, the historicity introduced by dialect has tremendous value, as does Marx's insistence on founding action on human need. But the business of binary opposition as the basic movement of history runs an unfortunate streak of distortion through much otherwise useful analysis.