The Hegel Variations by Fredric Jameson

Author:Fredric Jameson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

This unexpected revelation of the collective within individuality and its work will now lead us to two distinct yet fundamental lines of Hegel’s thought: the first is, of course, Spirit itself, in whose structure other people, and the universal they define, are constitutive: yet now in an historical way rather than a structural one, giving rise to that series of “shapes” as which we glimpse Hegel’s so-called philosophy of history.

The other direction in which the ethos of work and externalization takes us can be said to be metaphysical rather than historical, in the sense in which it registers what seem to be philosophical -isms and worldviews, rather than conjunctures and situations. What is at stake here is the Hegelian conception of immanence, a philosophical commitment that may run deeper than the celebration of an ethic of work and externalization (to which it must however be intimately related) and which will, particularly on the political level, be of great significance in the debate by subsequent generations about the revolutionary or reactionary implications of Hegel’s work.

But that debate needs to be prefaced by a different kind of qualification, namely that, despite his familiarity with Adam Smith and emergent economic doctrine,27 Hegel’s conception of work and labor—I have specifically characterized it as a handicraft ideology—betrays no anticipation of the originalities of industrial production or the factory system. And even though one influential strand of the Marxist tradition valorizes work-satisfaction and attempts to ideologize a positive and workerist conception of collective labor, it cannot be said that Hegel’s analyses of individual work and production here are easily transferred to the new industrial situation. Marx’s concept of the four-fold nature of what he calls alienation28 cannot be extrapolated from Hegel, although with an intensified dose of negativity it is possible to see the dialectic of Sartre’s Critique as a more radical development of Hegelian ideas of externalization and internalization, applied to history itself.

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