Over the last quarter-century, Jameson has been at once the timeliest and most untimely of American critics and writers. Not only did he develop interests in film, science fiction, or the work of Walter Benjamin, say, earlier than most of his colleagues in the humanities, he was also a pioneer of that enlargement of literary criticism (Jameson received a PhD in French literature from Yale in 1959) into all-purpose theory which made the discussion of all these things in the same breath established academic practice. More than this, he succeeded better than anyone else at defining the term, ‘postmodernism’, that sought to catch the historical specificity of the present age.

This was a matter, first, of cataloguing postmodernism’s superficial textures: the erosion of the distinction between high and pop culture; the reign of stylistic pastiche and miscellany; the dominance of the visual image and corresponding eclipse of the written word; a new depthlessness – ‘surrealism without the unconscious’ – in the dream-like jumble of images; and the strange alliance of a pervasive cultural nostalgia (as in the costume drama or historical novel) with a cultural amnesia serving to fragment ‘time into a series of perpetual presents’. If all that now sounds familiar, this owes something to the durability of Jameson’s account of postmodernism, first delivered as a lecture in 1982 and expanded two years later into an essay for New Left Review: a 40-page sketch that caught the features of the fidgety sitter more accurately than many longer studies before and since.

Jameson’s description of the mood and texture of postmodern life had, in its almost tactile authority, few rivals outside the work of DeLillo, Pynchon and (more to his own taste) William Gibson. And, as in their novels, local observation in Jameson was complemented by an implacable awareness of what he called the ‘unrepresentable exterior’ enclosing all the slick and streaming phenomena in view. In the novelists, however, allusion to the great ensphering system often took the form of paranoia. As a Marxist, Jameson was calmer and more forthright: he simply called the system late capitalism, after the book by Ernest Mandel, the Belgian Trotskyist, which provided the base, as it were, to his own cultural superstructure. Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972) had offered a magnificently confident and pugnacious argument about the nature of postwar capitalism, but he regretted ‘not being able to propose a better term for this historical era than “late capitalism”’. In Mandel’s usage, ‘late’ simply meant ‘recent’, but the term naturally also suggests obsolescence. This implication of an utterly misplaced Marxist triumphalism probably had consequences for the reception of Jameson’s theory (and Mandel’s). Who could believe in 1991, when Jameson published Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, that capitalism was on its last legs?

In fact, Jameson didn’t think it was either. His actual claim was more like the opposite: with the postwar elimination of pre-capitalist agriculture in the Third World and the last residue of feudal social relations in Europe, with the full commodification of culture (no more Rilke and Yeats and their noble patrons) and the infiltration of the old family-haunted unconscious by mass-disseminated images, humankind had only now embarked, for the first time, on a universally capitalist history. Late capitalism was the dawn, not the dusk, of a thoroughgoing capitalism. It constituted a ‘process in which the last surviving internal and external zones of precapitalism … are now ultimately penetrated and colonised in their turn’. This thesis can only have been reinforced by the advent of China as the workshop of the world and the channelling of so much of intimate life by the internet. My shoes are sewn under the supervision of the CCP, and Gmail fills the margins of my private correspondence with ads.

And yet if Jameson owed to Marxism the special freshness of his insights, it was the same Marxism that made his work so untimely. He seems to have achieved notoriety as America’s best-known Marxist in the years of the Soviet Union’s death throes, when Marxism of any kind was held to be empirically disproved and indelibly tainted with mass murder. Moreover, his particular commitments went considerably beyond an axiomatic materialism in which economic conditions necessarily carve out whatever room for manoeuvre artists and writers enjoy; that much Marxism any liberal citizen might have accepted or even, under postmodernism, found impossible to deny. Far more suspect, during a period when Utopia has been considered a euphemism for the Gulag, Jameson has also insisted time and again on the (usually unconscious) utopian element in all culture and politics, no matter how commercial the artefact or noxious the movement. The last words of Valences of the Dialectic maintain that ‘Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible’.

Jameson’s defence of the procedure he likes to call ‘totalisation’ has been in a similar vein. Totalisation might be defined as the intellectual effort to recover the relationship between a given object – a novel, a film, a new building or a body of philosophical work – and the total historical situation underneath and around it. To contemporary ears, the term inevitably calls up associations with totalitarianism, and there is no denying that the method derives explicitly from the work of the Communist Lukács and the fellow-traveller Sartre, whom Jameson also failed to disown. Anathema to conservatives, the recourse to ‘totality’ was no more endearing to a cultural left whose slogans included difference, heterotopia, nomadism etc. This left seems to have faded from the American scene in recent years, but orthodox anti-Marxism looks unbudging. ‘Outside of a few university comparative literature departments,’ Anne Applebaum wrote recently in the New York Review of Books, ‘Soviet-style Marxism itself is not a living political idea anywhere in the West.’ (It’s in ‘Soviet-style’ that the real malice lies.) A few weeks later, a prominent science writer declared in a letter to the New York Times that ‘Marx’s philosophy, put into practice, killed 30 million people through state-sponsored famines alone.’ The US remains a society in which Marxism can be advocated only a little more respectably than pederasty, and lately accusations of socialism erupt from the Republican Party more frequently than since McCarthy’s heyday.

In Late Marxism (1990), his book on Adorno, Jameson wrote of Dialectic of Enlightenment that ‘the question about poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the pool.’ With Jameson the question has been whether you could avoid reading him on a university campus, or continue reading him outside one. In Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Chip Lambert, a former associate professor of literature in his thirties, decides to purge his library of Marxist cultural critics in order to raise some funds with which to indulge the yuppie tastes of his new girlfriend, Julia. Each of these books, Chip recalls, had once ‘called out’ to him ‘with a promise of a radical critique of late capitalist society’. And yet: ‘Theodor Adorno didn’t have Julia’s grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn’t have Julia’s artful tongue.’ Unburdened of his Marxist texts and their ‘reproachful spines’, Chip proceeds to buy Julia a fillet of ‘wild Norwegian salmon, line caught’ for $78.40 at an upmarket grocery store Franzen calls the Nightmare of Consumption, a name to suggest that faced with the brazenness of yuppiedom (as by the 1990s it was no longer even called; it was just the way that almost anyone who could afford to be, was) all satire or cultural criticism met defeat. Jameson’s Postmodernism had concluded with a call to ‘name the system.’ Ten years later, the system seemed to reply cheerfully to any ugly name you might call it. Hi, I’m the Nightmare of Consumption. Nice to meet you!

The Corrections, as well as being a far better novel than Jameson’s stricture on an ‘exhausted realism’ would suggest it could be, is a central instance of the literary populism that we can now recognise as one of the main trends of the American novel over the past decade or so. Franzen had no wish to be an obscure or difficult artist in the way that Adorno might have approved, and wasn’t likely to mention Jameson without being able to trust that a good number of his readers would have some idea of who ‘Fred’ was. Similarly, in Sam Lipsyte’s new novel, The Ask, the forty-something narrator recalls that in college he learned about ‘late capitalism. And how to snort heroin.’ Interestingly, Lipsyte deals with the mediocre university where his narrator works in the same spirit of harassed literalism and defeated satire we can see in Franzen’s Nightmare of Consumption: he calls the institution the Mediocre University. (Years ago, Jameson noticed a similar cynicism, operating from the other side, in the motto of Forbes magazine: ‘The Capitalist Tool’.)

In both Franzen and Lipsyte the invocation of ‘late capitalism’ – a term most people encountered in Jameson, not Mandel – is a mark of immaturity, an outworn college creed. The thing itself may grow old with us, but the term can’t be used by middle-aged grown-ups participating in the real world (that is to say, the surface of the earth, minus college campuses). The same may go for ‘postmodernism’, a word which by now provokes the weariness it once served in part to describe. What, then, of the writer whose own name is indissolubly linked to these terms? Jameson’s latest book is about the dialectic, the unwieldy and now perhaps antique philosophical instrument invented by Hegel and handled back to front – a socialist tool – by Marx. A basic feature of dialectical thinking is the liability of subject and object to turn into each other, for the way a thing is looked at to become part of the look of the thing. Certainly that has been the case with Jameson himself and postmodernism: he became a landmark in the territory he had done so much to survey. The status of landmarks is ambiguous. Does a statue confirm the living influence of a man, or only that he belongs to the past?

It may not be too dialectical a characterisation of the dialectician to say that Jameson’s almost impossibly sophisticated variety of Marxist cultural criticism always wore the double aspect of a retreat and an advance. On the one hand, it appeared only to confirm the rout of the left that America’s most famous Marxist was not a militant, a union boss or an economist, but a professor of literature and the author of learned and anfractuous prose whose essays contained untranslated blocks of French and bristling semiotic diagrams known as Greimas rectangles. What did anyone have to fear from Marxism if what had once been ‘a unity of theory and practice’ was now chiefly a recondite species of book and movie criticism? Asylum in the literature department was surely just a prelude to an overdue extinction.

On the other hand, the Marxist tradition received in Jameson’s work about as profound a vindication of its interpretative mission as could be imagined. It was one thing for him to insist – first in The Political Unconscious (1981) – that Marxism was the hermeneutic code that subsumed all others, that only in light of Marx’s concept of the successive modes of production (hunting and gathering, early agriculture, feudalism and so on down to late capitalism) could the significance of any cultural or intellectual artefact be fully apprehended. But Jameson backed up the methodological boast in two ways.

First, with reserves of synthesising energy that simply outstripped anyone else’s, he was able to house within his own capacious and flexible scheme, like one of those skyscrapers that can bend in the wind, a remarkable number of newly important bodies of thought, including structuralist semiotics, longue durée history of the Annales variety, Frankfurt School Kulturkritik and the Marxian investigations of finance capital carried out by Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey. One trait of postmodernism unmentioned by Jameson was the special difficulty critics and thinkers of recent generations have experienced in conveying their thoughts except through the medium of someone else’s; intellectuals today tend to offer their commentary on the world by way of comments on another’s commentary. Jameson has been unique, however, in his extremes of inclusion or ventriloquism. He seems to have detected some aspect of the truth in virtually any body of work he’s discussed, and so to have recruited more, and more various, thinkers into the march of his own thoughts than any rival theorist. (Which means, among other things, that when he speculates about the fortunes of the great synthesiser Hegel in the years to come, it’s equally the survival of his own way of thinking that’s at issue.)

Second, starting in the early 1980s, Jameson produced what remains the most imposing account of the culture we all still inhabit. Postmodernism, he argued, did not spell the end of ‘metanarratives’, as Lyotard had claimed. It was better understood as the recruitment of the entire world into the same big story, namely the development of global capitalism. (This marked a slight shift from his earlier claim that human history was already unified by the successive modes of production.) As for the self-referential quality of so much postmodern culture – language about language, images of images – this confirmed rather than contradicted the intimate relationship of culture to the heavy machinery of material production. The self-reflective idiom of postmodernism merely showed that specialisation and the division of labour had seized the arts just as much as anything else; if culture increasingly talked about itself, this was because it talked increasingly to itself. In some ways, this was Max Weber’s old insight, later elaborated as a logic of ‘differentiation’ by the German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, another writer often cited by Jameson: the apparent autonomy of various cultural activities or ‘value spheres’ in reality reflected an increasingly unified and interconnected world. For Weber and Luhmann, modernity was the driver of this rationalisation and differentiation. For Jameson, modernity, like postmodernity, was just another name for an evolving capitalism. (Marx himself had of course observed in Capital ‘how division of labour seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society’.) So did every weightless postmodern artefact in fact testify to the specific gravity of the fully capitalist planet it only appeared to float free of.

The wrinkle in this logic of differentiation was that, under postmodernism, there was also a lot of de-differentiation going on, as witness the merger of high and low culture, the mixing of styles within a given work, and even the tendency of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ to blur into one another. On this last point, Jameson has sometimes suggested that, given the patent fancifulness of the financialised economy – so much ‘fictitious capital’ (as Marx called it) as disconnected from the ‘referent’ of reality as the most delirious products of postmodernism – and the obvious subordination of contemporary culture to the bottom line, ‘the economic could be observed to have become cultural (just as the culture could be observed to become economic and commodified).’ Theory as we’ve come to know it clearly offers another case of de-differentiation, in the breakdown of disciplinary boundaries between literary criticism, history, philosophy, anthropology and so on. With this in mind, Jameson has proposed a sort of homeopathic role for theory: intellectual de-differentiation countering the cultural/economic variety. At any rate, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find so much differentiation and de-differentiation taking place side by side. You might draw an analogy with business practices, which shift between vertical integration, or doing everything within one company, and subcontracting, in which tasks are farmed out.

All together, the sophistication of Jameson’s work and the breadth of his references had a dual effect. He wrote stirringly of the vocation of ‘dialectical philosophy and Marxism’ to ‘break out of the specialised compartments of the (bourgeois) disciplines and to make connections among the seemingly disparate phenomena of social life generally’, and clearly his own work belonged to and even crowned this Western Marxist lineage. Behind his project lay the understanding that social life is ‘a seamless web, a single inconceivable and transindividual process, in which there is no need to invent ways of linking language events and social upheavals or economic contradictions because on that level they were never separate from one another.’ And yet for Jameson to shepherd so many other theories and so much of contemporary culture into the big tent of his own theory could only be the task of a rare intelligence singularly devoted to the project. Such de-differentiation, in other words, was the fruit of a profound differentiation; all this totalising had to be purchased at the expense of what Marx called that ‘all engrossing system of specialising and sorting men, that development in a man of one single faculty at the expense of all others.’ Intellectually, Jameson was central. Socially, such a figure can hardly have been more marginal and ‘elite’, something that has become truer with each passing decade.

For Jameson has been a professor mostly at Duke, toniest of southern colleges. And you could say that American higher education itself suffered a dialectical reversal somewhere around 1980 – to date, the high-water mark of class mobility in the US – as the universities went from being among the main vehicles of egalitarianism to being the primary means of reproducing class privilege. Everyone talks, with good reason, about the runaway costs of healthcare in the US, but if healthcare inflation since 1980 has exceeded 400 per cent, the price of a university education has risen, on a recent calculation, by an incredible 827 per cent. Jameson’s Marxism might have been rare enough in any circumstances, but forces beyond his control also had the effect of making it seem outrageously expensive. Jameson recognised the problem: ‘What is socially offensive about “theoretical” texts like my own,’ he said in an interview, is ‘not their inherent difficulty, but rather the signals of higher education, that is, of class privilege, which they emit.’ But of course he couldn’t solve it.

The dialectic, Jameson explains in the new book, has among its main tasks the recovery of the common situation binding together thoughts or realities that seem on the face of it to have nothing in common – just the operation that he has often defended under the name of ‘totalisation’. He illustrates the idea with a famous example from Hegel: ‘Thus, the Slave is not the opposite of the Master, but rather, along with him, an equally integral component of the larger system called slavery or domination.’ This is a simple instance, since no special ingenuity is required to see that you can’t have slaves without masters or vice versa. It’s perhaps not much harder to grasp the idea of Fredric Jameson and someone like Sarah Palin as two faces of the same coin, figures truly as absurd as their opponents make them out to be, but only because the system itself is utterly cracked. So intellectual debility becomes a badge of populism, and socialist learning a hobby of rich people’s children.

Common, probably, to most favourable and unfavourable impressions of Jameson has been the image of him as an author of forbidding treatises, massive salt-licks of theory. Undeniably, many of the books are thick, including Valences of the Dialectic, a doorstop of some 600 pages. As with Jameson’s previous book, The Ideologies of Theory, the title alone brandishes two words that, in the US at least, can hardly be used in polite – which is to say, anti-intellectual – company. Reading Valences of the Dialectic on the subway I felt more sheepish than I had since bringing Gregor von Rezzori’s (ironically titled!) Memoirs of an Anti-Semite onboard.

The impression of Jameson’s erudition was never wrong, nor the sense that he could be a difficult writer. But it was a mistake to perceive him as the architect of colossal tomes. The longest of his books are in reality sheaves of essays; his original pages on postmodernism, though they would later be inserted into a great silver-blue volume ten times as long, show a pamphleteer’s provisional and exuberant spirit. But the postmodern age hasn’t been a pamphleteering one, and the left-wing journals in which Jameson’s articles have mostly appeared address an even narrower audience than the cultural studies section of an independent bookstore. Still, it’s more accurate to see Jameson as a writer of long essays than of long books. And the essays themselves regain their polemical sharpness and definition when considered in isolation and not as the chapters of so many books.

Two new essays, freshly composed for the occasion, bookend Valences of the Dialectic; in between are mainly reprints of pieces many of which don’t concern or exhibit dialectical thinking much more (or any less) than the rest of Jameson’s work in the years since he published ‘Toward a Dialectical Criticism’ (in Marxism and Form) in 1971. Of the bookends, the first offers a provisional introduction to the dialectic. That neither it nor the volume as a whole is meant to stand as definitive is made clear by a slightly comic footnote in which Jameson, regretting the lack of ‘the central chapter on Marx and his dialectic which was to have been expected’, promises two future volumes, on Hegel and Marx respectively, to ‘complete the project’. Meanwhile (a favourite Jamesonian transition, as if everything was present in his mind all at once, and it was only the unfortunately sequential nature of language that forced him to spell out sentence by sentence and essay by essay an apprehension of the contemporary world that was simultaneous and total), it may further correct the idea of him as a tome-monger to point out that such a mood of provisionality or hesitation runs throughout his work. For all the consistency of his commitments, he has not produced worked-out arguments and scholarly findings so much as a tissue of hints, hypotheses, recommendations and impressions. It would be easy to find many sentences in Jameson starting like this one: ‘Now we may begin to hazard the guess that something like the dialectic will always begin to appear when thinking approaches the dilemma of incommensurability …’ Such accumulated qualifications – and yet ‘always’. The effect here may approach self-parody, but that is a hazard no truly distinctive stylist avoids. Not often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force.

Jameson’s preference for a conditional over a declarative mood is a token of the necessarily speculative quality of what he does. It’s far easier to be sure that culture is indeed mediating the economy than to establish in any given case how such mediation works. In Valences of the Dialectic, at any rate, one of the most striking suggestions made in the introductory essay is that Hegel, who articulated his omnivorous philosophical logic at a time when industrial capitalism was hardly more than a local English affair, may have been seized by an intimation of the ultimately global logic of capitalism: capitalism too is forever enlarging itself, and bringing under one rule the most disparate people and places. So does creative destruction on the economic plane resemble the dialectic’s refusal to freeze or reify its concepts and stand pat. Dialectical thought, then, would be at once the mirror of capitalism and (in Marxist hands) its rival: the totalising imperative that is the dialectic confronting the totality that is capitalism. From this it follows that the dialectic, despite the musty air of the word, may be set to come into its own only today, with the universal installation of capitalism. The thought may be less outrageous than it appears. After all, it was an explicitly Hegelian formulation – the end of history – that captured for the public imagination the meaning of the collapse of Communism in Europe. Jameson’s reiterated Marxist reply is simply that the disappearance of the Second World and the elimination of pre-capitalist arrangements in the Third marks in fact the beginning of a universal history: ‘History, which was once multiple, is now more than ever unified into a single History.’ In characteristic Jamesonian fashion, the stray hints and speculations gather themselves, towards the end of Valences, into a stark and audacious proposition: ‘The worldwide triumph of capitalism … secures the priority of Marxism as the ultimate horizon of thought in our time.’ How’s that for dialectical?

The particular ‘dilemma of incommensurability’ preoccupying Jameson in the long concluding essay of Valences concerns the disjunction of biological or existential time (one’s threescore and ten) with the differently experienced time of History. By History, Jameson means the succession of the happy or unhappy destinies of whole peoples and classes within the ‘single vast unfinished plot’ – as he put it almost 30 years ago in The Political Unconscious – of humankind’s existence. Of course individual experience and collective fate consist in the same living substance, but the sensation of their identity, ‘a recognition of our ultimate Being as History’, is a rare and fleeting glimpse into the demographic sublime – all those suffering persons dead, living and still unborn – too dizzying and appalling to be sustained.

Jameson has argued for years that the intersection of existential and historical time has become particularly rare in postmodern times. In spite of the obvious historical novelty of our present way of life, the past tends to fall rapidly away into oblivion or else to be taken up by media representations that serve as ‘the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia’. The result, as he put it in his great essay ‘The Antinomies of Postmodernity’ in The Seeds of Time (1994), was that ‘for us time consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus without overlapping or traditional states.’

No one, it seems to me, has better conveyed the oddly becalmed quality of recent decades, the sense of a ‘locked social geology so massive that no visions of modification seem possible (at least to those ephemeral biological subjects that we are)’. It was in the light of the feeling of a windless postmodern stasis that Jameson wanted to stick up for utopianism, especially in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), his appreciation of Utopia as a subgenre of science fiction and an immortal human desire: ‘The very political weakness of Utopia in previous generations – namely that it furnished nothing like an account of agency, nor did it have a coherent historical and practical-political picture of transition – now becomes a strength in a situation in which neither of these problems seems currently to offer candidates for a solution.’ The dialectic, Adorno said, would renounce itself if it renounced the ‘idea of potentiality’, and it was just this dimension that Jameson meant to preserve amid the deadly consensus as to the unsurpassable virtues of liberal capitalism.

In ‘The Valences of History’, the concluding essay of the new book, Jameson argues that when the fitful apprehension of history does enter the lives of individuals it is often through the feeling of belonging to a particular generation: ‘The experience of generationality is … a specific collective experience of the present: it marks the enlargement of my existential present into a collective and historical one.’ A generation, he adds, is not forged by passive endurance of events, but by hazarding a collective project. That this too is uncommon enough can be deduced from Jameson’s example of the process: ‘Avant-gardes are so to speak the voluntaristic affirmation of the generation by sheer willpower, the allegories of a generational mission that may never come into being.’ So the small sect crystallises the would-be universal – an ironic and possibly dialectical contradiction, and a fitting suggestion for a Marxist professor to make amid a near unchallenged global capitalism.

The theme of generations recurs from time to time in Jameson, whose work in any case proceeds less by straightforward argumentation than by a kaleidoscopic rotation across a consistent set of problems. In ‘Periodising the 60s’ (1984), he noted that ‘the classification by generations has become as meaningful for us as it was for the Russians of the late 19th century, who sorted character types out with reference to specific decades,’ and in that essay and elsewhere this rigorously non-confessional writer has hinted at the decisive importance of the 1960s in his own formation. Jameson’s fellow Marxist critics Perry Anderson and Terry Eagleton (with some cosmic design evidently at work in the similarity of all three names) have already testified to his eminence in such a way as to give some sense of his importance to their own generation. It is a generation in which a younger person notices, though not especially among the Marxists, a widespread and not infrequently pathetic tendency toward serial intellectual and cultural faddism, which makes it the more impressive and even inspiring – to Jameson’s peers as well, it may be – that he has stayed so true to the utopian stirrings of the 1960s while remaining open to so much of what’s come since.

Jameson once likened the goofy eclecticism of certain postmodern architecture to the recipes inspired by ‘late-night reefer munchies’, and it may be an observation to bridge the gap between his generation, steeped in the 1960s, and my own to say that reading Jameson himself has always reminded me a bit of being on drugs. The less exceptional essays were like being stoned: it all seemed very profound at the time, but the next day you could barely remember a thing. Indeed there’s no other author I’ve frequented or admired to anything like the same degree so many of whose pages produced absolutely no impression on me. And yet the best of Jameson’s work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you’d always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. One of the trippier as well as more affecting passages in Valences of the Dialectic is a sort of aria on the condition of living, through global capitalism, in a totally man-made world, one in which even the weather patterns and the geological age (the Anthropocene, it was recently declared) are human productions:

We have indeed secreted a human age out of ourselves as spiders secrete their webs: an immense, all-encompassing ceiling … which shuts down visibility on all sides even as it absorbs all the formerly natural elements in its habitat, transmuting them into its own man-made substance. Yet within this horizon of immanence we wander as alien as tribal people, or as visitors from outer space, admiring its unimaginably complex and fragile filigree and recoiling from its bottomless potholes, lounging against a rainwall of exotic and artificial plants or else agonising among poisonous colours and lethal stems we were not taught to avoid. The world of the human age is an aesthetic pretext for grinding terror or pathological ecstasy, and in its cosmos, all of it drawn from the very fibres of our own being and at one with every post-natural cell more alien to us than nature itself, we continue murmuring Kant’s old questions – What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? – under a starry heaven no more responsive than a mirror or a spaceship, not understanding that they require the adjunct of an ugly and bureaucratic representational qualification: what can I know in this system? What should I do in this world completely invented by me? What can I hope for alone in an altogether human age?

In such a passage it’s possible to see a few things. One is as much evidence as a few lines could offer for placing Jameson among the important American writers of the age tout court. Another is his special way of being one of those (to vary what Henry James said) by whom nothing is abandoned: the apprehension of the alienness of the world is the signature experience in Sartre’s Nausea, whose author was the subject of Jameson’s PhD thesis and first book; the ‘human age’ alludes to the trilogy of novels by Wyndham Lewis, subject of another book-length study by Jameson; and the situation described here, of humanity confronting its own handiwork as something alien and exterior, is very much that of Marx’s alienated labour, in which the worker is dominated by the product of his own hands, his estranged ‘species-being’ ranged against him in the form of someone else’s capital. But the reader’s impression of tremendous intellectual power is accompanied by one of political paralysis. Who is this collective human ‘I’, in a world ‘completely invented by me’? Nobody at all, of course. Again, the analogy with drugs: perceptual journeys across the universe, confined to the couch.

My impression is that it’s this combination of hypertrophied theory and atrophied ‘praxis’ in Jameson that causes his name to provoke as many smirks as sighs of admiration. But from the point of view that he has so imposingly established and defended it would be a bit moralising, individualistic and certainly undialectical to judge whether it was good or bad that Marxism has taken the form it does in his work. The most intelligible Marxist account of individual greatness in a writer or artist is that it belongs to the figure who opens himself unreservedly to the sociohistorical forces in play. ‘The intervening individual subject,’ Adorno wrote in Aesthetic Theory (1970), ‘is scarcely more than a limiting value, something minimal required by the artwork for its crystallisation.’ Jameson’s tremendous cultural and intellectual receptivity would alone seem enough to certify his achievement. In what rival body of work is there more of the contemporary world to see? And how can he be taxed with failing to formulate a political programme not on offer anywhere else? It is already a substantial feat to have preserved and extended the legacy of Marxism for a generation of intellectuals in which it might otherwise have nearly expired.

What now? The near consensus that obtained for a quarter-century on politics and economics, leaving culture as the real terrain of battle, seems to have faltered over the past few years. What does this do to Jameson’s work? One threat to his legacy is that it’s hard to imagine any of his inheritors excelling him in sophistication. Perry Anderson has hailed Jameson as the culmination of Western Marxism. In literary history, culminations – of, say, the psychological novel in Proust, or Romanticism in Yeats, or a certain modernism in Beckett – often look like dead ends. And why would going further be necessary? Jameson himself has suggested that in light of the obvious instability and injustice of global capitalism, a perfectly vulgar Marxism might now do just as well.

And yet the relative neglect of strictly economic questions in Jameson (and in Western Marxism generally) may now look like a liability. After all, the recent implosion of the markets, and efficient market theory with them, hasn’t induced a stampede in the direction of Marxism. The crisis revived interest in Keynes and Minsky, but it will apparently take until the next convulsion, or longer, for the same to happen to Marx the economist, and the writers from Hilferding to Harvey who worked out a Marxian theory of finance.

Of course it would contradict Jameson’s account of how culture works if his own writing didn’t reproduce some of the blind spots he detects in the world at large, where material production seems somehow to be hidden from view and where social transformation looks like a dead letter. Still, the weak point, it seems to me, in Jameson’s strongly Marxist account of recent culture has been his relatively thin description of the economy, the mode of production. It is too easy to read much of his work and conclude that a given film, say, could indeed be read as a blind allegory of ‘late capitalism’, without late capitalism meaning anything much more distinct than ‘the economy’ or ‘the system’. In such cases it has been far easier to accept his Marxism in an axiomatic sense – a product of late capitalism will necessarily be about late capitalism too – than to see how the axiom could be embodied in persuasive local analyses of this or that cultural artefact or tendency.

And yet it isn’t as if Jameson can’t do that too. Some of his strongest essays, for instance ‘The Brick and the Balloon’ (1998) or ‘The End of Temporality’ (2003) – about, respectively, postmodern architecture and the waning contemporary sense of past and future – analyse these phenomena the more convincingly and illuminatingly for doing so in the context of the bodiless and instantaneous transactions of finance capital. It would only have enriched Jameson’s work if he had directed his attention to the cultural fallout of other novel features of the latest stage of capitalism: Mandel mentioned not only computerisation and the rise of the service industries, themes Jameson has occasionally taken up, but also accelerated turnover time for fixed capital (i.e. a shorter period in which to recoup one’s investment), and the replacement of the gold standard by floating currencies. It’s not hard to imagine these transformations of the base percolating up through the superstructure. The mass introduction of women into the paid workforce, the expansion of advertisable space, the displacement of cash by credit cards and digital transactions: these are a few of the other economic changes in recent decades that come to mind as having suffused the superstructure too. Perhaps the outstanding virtue of David Harvey’s Condition of Postmodernity (1989) was his correlation of sped-up cultural change with a general ‘space-time compression’ operating in contemporary capitalism across such disparate features as a casualised labour market, expanded international trade, shorter-term investment and so on – though it should be added that Harvey’s work along these lines followed Jameson’s and might not have been possible without it.

Jameson has often written of a given stage of capitalism setting the ‘conditions of possibility’ within which a writer or artist has to work. It might equally be said of his own work as a critic that it established the conditions of possibility for a Marxist cultural criticism at least as often as it offered an example of such a thing. Here, then, is another of Jameson’s contradictions: sighing with cultural belatedness, his essays have also seemed like preludes, prolegomena, to work yet to be done. Whether this work will use the word ‘postmodernism’ doesn’t seem very important. In fact it’s probably worth remembering Jameson’s ‘therapeutic’ recommendation, at the end of A Singular Modernity (2002), that capitalism might be substituted ‘for modernity in all the contexts in which the latter appears’, and extending the suggestion to postmodernity too. That would place us squarely in the midst of a capitalist or (to periodise a bit more) neoliberal culture, waiting to see what comes next. It would also place us in Jameson’s debt.

Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century
by Masha Gessen
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 242 pp., $26.00

Masha Gessen’s Perfect Rigor is a fascinating biography of Grigory (Grisha) Perelman, the fearsomely brilliant and notoriously antisocial Russian mathematician. Perelman proved the Poincaré Conjecture, one of mathematics’ most important and intractable problems, in 2002—almost a century after it was first posed, and just two years after the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a one-million-dollar prize for its solution.

Gessen herself grew up in the former Soviet Union, is roughly Perelman’s age, and has a mathematical background, which facilitated her interviews with many of his classmates, mentors, teachers, and colleagues. Not surprisingly, she did not interview the reclusive mathematician or his mother, with whom he currently lives. But the others give a convincing picture not only of him but also of the strange world of Soviet mathematics, which was divided between the official, rigid mathematical establishment and the informal mathematical counterculture. The former, because of its historical importance to engineering and military projects, was supported by the Party and the government; the latter consisted of scholars who loved mathematics for its own sake and used it as a way to escape the stultifying influence of officious apparatchiks.

Born in 1966 to Jewish parents, Perelman came of age when this distinction was breaking down during the era of glasnost and perestroika. By the time he was ten he began to show a talent for mathematics, and his mother, who had abandoned her own graduate work in the field in order to raise him, enrolled him in an after-school math club coached by Sergei Rukshin, a mathematics undergraduate at Leningrad University. Rukshin was a troubled youth who became obsessed with mathematics and gradually developed a rigorous, distinctive, and very effective method of teaching problem-solving. Over the last twenty years, approximately half of all Russian entrants to the International Mathematical Olympiad have studied with him.

Only nineteen himself when he met Perelman, Rukshin stayed in contact with him from his first after-school math club until, it seems, a relatively recent break. He found that the not yet adolescent Perelman, described by Gessen as “an ugly duckling among ugly ducklings…pudgy and awkward,” was already unusually deliberate and precise in his thinking. Alexander Golovanov, who studied math alongside Perelman, said that Rukshin’s growing commitment to and love for Perelman came to give meaning to his own life. Like many a competitive sports coach, Rukshin hated it when his charges engaged in anything other than his sport. This was an unnecessary restriction in Perelman’s case since from the beginning he seemed uninterested in girls or anything other than mathematics.

When Perelman was fourteen, Rukshin spent the summer tutoring him in English; he accomplished in a few months what generally took four years of study. Perelman had to fulfill the English requirement to get into Leningrad’s Specialized Mathematics School Number 239. As Gessen writes, these mathematical high schools owe much to Andrei Kolmogorov, arguably the most important Soviet mathematician of the twentieth century and a figure who straddled the divide in Soviet mathematics mentioned above.

Kolmogorov, who did seminal work in probability, complexity theory, and other subjects, was something of an anomaly. A prolific mathematician, he was also passionately interested in education and devised an imaginative secondary school curriculum featuring mathematics first of all, but also classical music, sports, hiking, literature, poetry, and activities intended to foster male bonding. In the schools that he inspired, his disciples promoted Greek and Renaissance values and tried to protect their students from Marxist indoctrination. Eventually Kolmogorov was denounced as an agent of Western influence in the Soviet Union, but his ideas still permeated School 239 when Perelman studied there.

Valery Ryzhik, Perelman’s teacher at School 239, remembered him as “such a little boy” who sat in the back of the class. Ryzhik and Rukshin employed Kolmogorovian methods of instruction and character-building and dragooned the students into long walks, which Perelman endured but didn’t enjoy. A brilliant man himself, Ryzhik was denied entry to Leningrad University because he was Jewish, but Perelman, as he is described here, seemed oblivious not only to Ryzhik’s past difficulties, but also to the pervasive Soviet anti-Semitism and, indeed, to any sort of political issues.

The school insulated Perelman and allowed him to think that the world, like the math classroom, was a place where logic mattered and rules were interpreted strictly. It also allowed him to grow his fingernails until they curved. And if he wanted to eat only a particular kind of raisin bread with peanuts on the surface (which he didn’t like and scraped off), he could do so. Ensconced in his mathematical cocoon, he could tune out all the messy inconsistencies and contingencies of life in general and of Soviet life in particular.

As he approached the end of his days at School 239, Perelman had to think about the next stage of his education. Gessen writes that for a Jewish boy gifted in mathematics to be admitted to a university, there were three possibilities: hope you were one of the two Jews accepted at Leningrad University every year; go somewhere with less draconian admission policies; or make it onto the Soviet team for the International Mathematical Olympiad, which guaranteed admission to Leningrad University. Perelman decided to try out for the team.

Accompanied by his seemingly omnipresent mother, he embarked on a grueling training program held in a town near Moscow and run by Alexander Abramov, who later remarked that Perelman never encountered a problem in a competition that he couldn’t solve. He won a gold medal in the 1982 Olympiad with a perfect score and gained admission to Leningrad University.

After Abramov, Perelman’s mentors and teachers were world-class mathematicians in their own right, and Gessen provides brief sketches of all of them. In particular, there were Viktor Zalgaller, his undergraduate adviser at Leningrad University and an eminent geometer; Alexander Danilovich Alexandrov, his graduate adviser and a distinguished mathematician and philosopher; and Alexandrov’s student Yuri Burago, another prominent differential geometer. The latter two were instrumental in getting Perelman a postdoctoral position at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Leningrad. Mikhail Gromov was yet another important mathematician who on several occasions helped ease Perelman’s way into the larger mathematical world.

A big part of that larger world was the US, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s Perelman worked on theorems in Riemannian geometry as a postdoctoral fellow at a number of American universities, including NYU, SUNY Stony Brook, and UC Berkeley. After succinctly and elegantly proving a topological theorem called the Soul Conjecture—which dealt with the use of small parts (“souls”) of certain geometrical figures to deduce the wholes—in 1994, Perelman was widely recognized as a star and offered positions at both Stanford and Princeton. He declined both offers, rejecting Princeton’s because the math department had the temerity, in his view, to ask for a CV. Perelman thought the results he’d already proved and a lecture he’d given there should have been sufficient to warrant granting him immediate tenure. In 1995 he returned to the Steklov Institute.

The next year the European Mathematical Society planned to announce the award of a prize to Perelman, and he responded by saying he’d create an unpleasant scene if he was given it. According to Gromov, he believed that his work was not complete, that the judges were not qualified to assess it, and that he, not they, should decide when he should receive a prize.

Gessen, on the basis of many incidents of Perelman’s prickliness, his long hair and fingernails and Rasputin-like appearance, and his often asocial behavior, suggests that he has Asperger’s syndrome, sometimes referred to as autism-lite. Quoting the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert in the field, she writes that people with Asperger’s have limited social skills, have trouble communicating, often speak oddly (their speech is characterized sometimes by jarring transitions, literal interpretations, or obliviousness to nuance), and frequently need help with the minutiae of everyday living and so are dependent on others, such as their mothers, as was the case with Perelman.

Moreover, they are extraordinarily good at systematizing but extraordinarily poor at empathizing, and have what Baron-Cohen calls an “extreme male brain.” They lack a built-in “theory of mind,” the ability both to easily imagine other people’s points of view and to realize that others will evaluate situations differently. For them, truth is literal and uniform. For example, seeing that a ball has been moved from one cup to another while someone has left the room, many people with Asperger’s expect that on the person’s return he will know that the ball is now in the other cup.

In part because of their training, mathematicians deal with universal statements and often tend to interpret assertions literally. (For a personal example, whenever I see the bumper sticker “War is never the answer,” I think that, to the contrary, war most certainly is the answer, if the question is “What is a three-letter word for organized armed conflict?”) Baron-Cohen thinks there’s more to the matter than this, however. He maintains that there is some neurological reason for the strong correlation between mathematical talent and Asperger’s syndrome. Whether true or not, mathematicians do score consistently higher on what he calls his AQ (autism-spectrum quotient) test, and Gessen writes that she herself has a high AQ. Although there are many gregarious mathematicians, there may be some truth in the definition of an extroverted one: he’s the one who looks at your feet while he’s talking.

Still, Perelman’s behavior, unusual as it sometimes has been, doesn’t seem all that peculiar to me. I suspect that a small part of the appeal of his story depends on the satisfaction people derive from reading about unbalanced scientists and mathematicians. Witness the popularity of A Beautiful Mind , the biography of John Nash, or The Strangest Man , the recent biography of the physicist Paul Dirac.¹ The phenomenon is vaguely akin to the schadenfreude elicited by tabloids’ tales of celebrities’ faults and foibles.

Perelman seemed to fade from the mathematics scene after 1995, but then in 2002 and 2003 he posted on the Internet (rather than submit to a journal) three papers in which he sketched a proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, as well as some more general results. It is these three papers that Gessen calls “the mathematical breakthrough of the century” in the subtitle of her book. What is the Poincaré Conjecture? Useful in understanding it are a few ideas from topology, the branch of geometry concerned with the basic properties of geometric figures that remain unchanged when they are stretched and shrunk, deformed and distorted, or subjected to any “smooshing,” as long as they’re not ripped or punctured. Size and shape are not topological properties; figures shaped like melons, dice, and baseball bats are deemed topologically equivalent since they can be contracted, expanded, and transformed into one another without ripping or puncturing.

Whether a closed curve in space has a knot in it or not is, however, a topological property of the curve in space. That a closed non-self-intersecting curve on a flat plane, no matter how convoluted it is, divides the plane into two parts—the inside and the outside—is a topological property of the curve. How many dimensions a geometric figure possesses, whether or not it has a boundary, and if so of what sort—these too are topological properties.

“A diagram showing ‘simple connectedness,’ a topological property allowing for, in this example, a rubber band around the surface of a sphere to be shrunk to no more than a point. This property was long known to characterize two-dimensional spheres and has now been shown to characterize three-dimensional spheres as well by Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré Conjecture.”

also a matter of topological significance is the genus of a figure—the number of holes it contains. A ball has genus 0 since it contains no holes; a torus (a doughnut, bagel, or inner tube–shaped figure) has genus 1; eyeglass frames without the lenses have genus 2; and so on. Genus 0 objects such as melons and baseball bats are topologically equivalent. Less obviously, a doughnut and a coffee cup with a handle are both figures of genus 1. To see this, imagine that the cup is made of clay. Flatten the body of the cup and expand the size of its handle by squeezing material from the body into the handle. The finger hole of the cup’s handle is in this way transformed into the hole of the doughnut.Henri Poincaré was a French mathematical polymath who laid the foundation for chaos theory and came close to discovering the theory of relativity, among other accomplishments. In a 1904 paper he famously wondered whether a certain topological property of a sphere holds for higher-dimensional analogues of a sphere.

To understand that property, imagine stretching a rubber band around the surface of a ball. We can contract this rubber band slowly, making sure it neither breaks nor loses contact with the ball, and in this way shrink the rubber band so that it becomes no more than a point. (See illustration on this page.) We can’t shrink it to a point if the rubber band is stretched around a doughnut (either around the hole or around the body) or around a pretzel. We can do it, however, if the rubber band is stretched around any topological equivalent of a smooshed ball such as a deformed melon, a crooked die, or a baseball bat with protuberances sticking out of it.

The surface of the ball, but not that of the doughnut, is said to be “simply connected.” Poincaré was aware of the fact that a two-dimensional sphere—the topological term for the two-dimensional surface of a three-dimensional ball—could be defined by this property of simple connectivity. That is, any simply connected two-dimensional closed surface, however distorted, is topologically equivalent to the surface of a ball. He wondered if simple connectedness might characterize three-dimensional spheres as well. The statement that it does so is the Poincaré Conjecture.

This may not sound that daunting until we understand what a three-dimensional sphere is. Topologically speaking, a one-dimensional sphere is the boundary of a circle, i.e., a one-dimensional line of constant curvature on a two-dimensional plane. And, as mentioned, a two-dimensional sphere is the two-dimensional surface of a ball in three-dimensional space. A three-dimensional sphere would be a formally analogous but much more abstract entity: the three-dimensional boundary of a ball in four-dimensional space.

This fourth dimension is easy to define formally but difficult to grasp, except by analogy. Two numerical coordinates are needed to locate a point on a two-dimensional plane, and three to locate it in a three-dimensional space; four-dimensional space is that hypothetical space in which four coordinates are needed. It contains four-dimensional equivalents to our familiar three-dimensional geometrical objects—a four-dimensional cube, for example, known as a tesseract, that has sixteen corners and thirty-two edges to a cube’s eight and twelve. (See illustration on page 45.) A four-dimensional ball, then, would have the same relation to a normal three-dimensional ball that that three-dimensional ball has to the two-dimensional interior of a circle. Such a four-dimensional ball, and the three-dimensional sphere that bounds it, can’t be visualized except in cross-sections—or, it is said, by a very few mathematicians like William Thurston of Cornell University—and can only be defined rigorously and elaborated upon by means of logical rules informed by a flickering intuition.

As with any important mathematical conjecture, there are partial results along the path to proving it on which later mathematicians must stand, as with Newton’s statement “we stand on the shoulders of giants.” In the case of the Poincaré Conjecture, partial results accumulated over time. In particular, these included proofs of the equivalent conjecture for spheres of dimensions greater than three, but not for three. Many brilliant mathematicians, among them Michael Freedman, Stephen Smale, John Stallings, and Christopher Zeeman, engaged in this work.

William Thurston and Richard Hamilton, a mathematician at Berkeley, made seminal contributions that pointed the way to Perelman’s proving of the much more intractable three- dimensional Poincaré Conjecture. Thurston speculated that there were only a small number of different geometries possible for three-dimensional shapes, from which the Poincaré Conjecture would follow as a corollary, but he didn’t prove it. Still, the suggestion and a partial proof of it stimulated more work on the Poincaré Conjecture by Hamilton and had a part in Perelman’s work as well.

Hamilton’s strategy, roughly described, made use of the fact that spheres of every dimension have a constant curvature. Therefore, if an undifferentiated blob in a higher-dimensional space could be kneaded and massaged and distorted, without puncturing or tearing, into something with constant curvature, then this would prove that the blob was, topologically, a three-dimensional sphere after all. To approach this constant curvature Hamilton used a mathematical tool called the Ricci flow. This is a mathematical method of transforming shapes that has somewhat the same effect as heat flowing through a space: as the heat flows it makes the temperature more uniform and in the process smooths out bumps and mountains, hollows and valleys, thereby revealing the underlying shape. Think of blowing hot air into a crinkled-up balloon.

Sometimes, however, it turns out that the Ricci flow must be interrupted at “singularities” (places where the process breaks down and part of the shape starts to stretch on and on, beyond bound—a little like dividing by zero) and a repair must be made using a controlled process of grafting on pieces of other shapes that topologists call “surgery.” Before Perelman’s work there was no guarantee that repairs could be made for every type of singularity and for every recurrence of the same type. Perelman dazzlingly showed that all possible singularities were reparable, and he demonstrated how to do the requisite surgeries and put all the stringy and lumpy pieces of the blob together. As Gessen writes:

He succeeded because he used the unfathomable power of his mind to grasp the entire scope of possibilities: he was ultimately able to claim that he knew all that could happen…as the object reshaped itself.

Robert Webb/Great Stella/Wikimedia Commons

A representation of a tesseract, the four-dimensional equivalent of a three-dimensional cube. It has sixteen corners and thirty-two edges to a cube’s eight and twelve.

Perelman’s three papers on the Internet outlining his proof set off a flurry of checking, explicating, and polishing among at least three sets of eminent mathematicians: Bruce Kleiner and John Lott, both of the University of Michigan; John Morgan of Columbia University and Gang Tian of MIT; and XiPing Zhu of Sun Yatsen University in China and HuaiDong Cao of Lehigh University. The checking was necessary because, as Lott wrote:

It has taken us some time to examine Perelman’s work. This is partly due to the originality of Perelman’s work and partly to the technical sophistication of his arguments. All indications are that his arguments are correct.

The vetting process also gave rise to the controversy brought to public attention by the New Yorker article “Manifold Destiny” by Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind , and David Gruber.² A paper by Cao and Zhu had been originally entitled “A Complete Proof of the Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures—Application of the HamiltonPerelman Theory of the Ricci Flow,” but after criticism, they revised it with the more modest title “HamiltonPerelman’s Proof of the Poincaré Conjecture and the Geometrization Conjecture.” They also toned down their original claim, “we give a complete proof,” replacing it with “we give a detailed exposition of the complete proof.” The original paper, which the eminent Harvard mathematician and Fields Medal winner ShingTung Yau initially promoted (Cao and Zhu were his students), seemed to some to arrogate credit for the final proof of the Poincaré Conjecture to themselves when what they were really doing was explicating and polishing Perelman’s work.

In 2006, Perelman turned down the prestigious Fields Medal, sometimes described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, for his work in proving the Poincaré Conjecture. He explained, “Everybody understood that if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed.” Whether because of the credit controversy, a disinclination to be in the public eye, or a generalized feeling of disgust, Perelman seems to have dropped out of the mathematical world, and he now lives with his mother in an apartment in St. Petersburg.

Up until March of this year, there remained one more chapter to the Perelman saga. Would he accept the one-million-dollar prize promised by the Clay Mathematics Institute for solving one of the seven so-called Millennium Problems? While the rules say that a proof must appear in a peer-reviewed mathematics journal (not just in an Internet posting), the mathematicians mentioned above have published papers in such journals expounding and amplifying the proof. Surely Perelman deserves the prize, which he was finally and officially offered on March 18.

Five days later, on March 23, Perelman rejected the Clay prize. He reportedly said through the closed door to his spartan apartment, “I have all I want.” The comments he made after rejecting the Fields Medal probably reflect his present state of mind as well:

I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I’m not a hero of mathematics. I’m not even that successful. That is why I don’t want to have everybody looking at me.

Some might argue that monetary awards for mathematical work are inappropriate, or that the Poincaré Conjecture is of little practical value and not worth the one-million-dollar prize. The aesthetic and epistemic value of the proof is priceless, however, and it may eventually yield more earthly consequences as well. As for the size of the award—how many no-name hacks are there on Wall Street who make a million dollars or more not just once but every year, and contribute exactly what? Whether Perelman has practical need for the money or not, he could use it to help support his mother or mathematicians of his liking, or to advance the kind of education conceived by Andrei Kolmogorov, or for some purpose only he could imagine. Reconsider your decision, Grisha.