> Putting the point about self-contradiction in the form of a "Socratic"
> question: How, given that "actors and agents" are "constrained by their own
> ideological limits and those of their moment of history", is it possible for
> the actor and agent Jameson to know that "it would be better to think of
> Lenin or Brecht ... as failures"?
Failures in the sense that history didn't end there, that they solved certain problems, and thereby rendered other problems possible. Without Brecht, no Heiner Mueller; without Lenin, no Central European social democracy. In the total system, you succeed only by failing (i.e. in relation to the system's compulsory definition of success). There are plenty of tensions and contradictions in Fred's thought which one can take issue with, but he's always dialectical, the concepts are always moving somewhere. His talk, though, did something new, which I've never seen in his work before: latched on to Adorno's negative dialectics in a concrete way. That shows tremendous sensitivity to the needs of the global Left circa 2001, razorsharp antenna.
-- Dennis