34 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the meaning of a work: the identity, that is, of a subject of a work. This being so, I presume, it should be made clear at the very outset that I have no intention of suspending this reference. What the Weimar philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin, has claimed translates into an important scheme of possibility. According to him: The immanent tendency of the work and, accordingly, the standard for its immanent criticism is the reflection which has at its basis and is imprinted in its form. Yet this is, in truth not so much a standard of judgement as, first and foremost, the foundation of a completely different kind of criticism which is not concerned with judging, and whose center of gravity has not in the estimation of the single work but in demonstrating its relation to all other works and, ultimately, to the idea of art.2 This, with the relevant modifications - notice that Benjamin is alluding to the space of art, and not, as with Javeed (as we shall see) the space of politics - could well serve as a methodological introduction to the schemes invented herein. Needless to say, I shall be redeploying these near-formal protocols throughout this review CIRCLES OF MEDIATION There are, of course, ways of reading the form, as well as the content, of theoretical debates and critical moves and countermoves. In fact, for anyone interested in the procedures which the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson has called cognitive mapping,3 Javeed's ILM shows patterns of thought and argument directed not only at substantive issues of politics, process and history, but, by way of a self-positing of modernity, explaining how it could even be possible to think coherently about some basic category and/or experience: one does not need to extrapolate the metaphysical slogans of modernity (the way that Marxists - and non-Marxists alike - continue to do with Enlightenment relativities). It is the nature of this mapping procedure that I believe is suggestive, and not for predictive purposes either, or with a view toward identifying recurrent patterns. Rather, Javeed sets us the example of a criticism of criticism, a theorization about theory, which, while alive to the passionate contexts of interventions in the present, also attempts a measure of their reactive profiles. In particular, ILM discloses the fidelity with which so many ideologically different positions offer precise symptoms of the absence of that 'unembodied surplus' Javeed traces as modernity. I shall return to this presently, but perhaps the most important reason for the