A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present New York: Verso, 2002
Even after all those glowing glass-box houses in recent Hollywood films; all those galleries, biennials, and art magazines boosting new and neo-abstractions; and all those meetings of the transatlantic Modernist Studies Association, it’s still a shock to see modernism revived on the portable stage sets of the Occupation Authority in Iraq. Who would have thought that the modernist intellectual denounced in so many passages of twentieth-century anti-totalitarianism–the philosopher-king/bureaucrat with a fetish for the Absolute, the Utopian, and the Ideological with a capital “I”–would survive the end of history in the form of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and assorted Straussian others, a circle who’ve made the prospect of military control of the Pentagon a liberal daydream? As it turns out, Fredric Jameson might have thought it, had he spent another year or so revising the German lectures he published in 2002 under the title A Singular Modernity, a text that declares itself part of the “antepenultimate volume” of his series The Poetics of Social Forms (iv). What Jameson apparently intends as “the theoretical section” of his next to next-to-last book protests the erosion of the analytical slogan of postmodernism, if not the evaporation of full postmodernity, the period of capitalist history he reinvented and personified for late-century historical materialists and graduate students everywhere (iv). Instead of “healthy movements of disgust and revulsion,…the very sound of windows breaking and old furniture being thrown out,” he complains, “we have begun in the last few years to witness…the return to and the reestablishment of all kinds of old [modernist] things,” the reinstallation, to extend Jameson’s decorative domestic metaphor, of grandma and grandpa’s Danish modern living-room set (1). Traditional philosophy, powered by its “hoariest subfields, such as ethics,” leads the parade of retrenchment, followed by the “older political economy” of the market, and trailed by a wrongfully resuscitated bourgeois aesthetics (2).
For the author of A Singular Modernity, the resurrection of the modernist intellectual within the fortified walls of the Pentagon and the Coalition Provisional Authority is likely no great surprise, given what he paints as the forces, relations, and corruptions that inspire the modern revival more generally. Jameson’s preface on the “Regressions of the Present Age” provides a grab-bag of causes for this revival, but leads with the case that the second victory of the modern is tied to the “defeat of Marxism” within an increasingly professionalized and privatized university, a defeat which “checked the flow of contemporary theory at its source,…[namely,] the Marxist problematic” (3). Postmodernity, first among purportedly Marxian graphs of the present, became a conservative target “when some of its nastier consequences–a retheorization of late capitalism, feminism, coming to terms with so-called `relativism’ and the constructedness of social reality–[were accurately perceived]” (7). As Jameson pictures it, the hibernating concept of modernity, like its equally aged cultural cousin, modernism, appealed to reactionary anti-postmodernists because it is at once traditional and dynamic. On the one hand, “modernity, which traces its lineage back to the founding fathers of sociology…seems respectable and academic enough” (7): more properly professorial, surely, than studies of difference and pastiche in Middlemarch and Madonna. On the other hand, modernity answers the need for a tale of global progress even after the collapse of radical grand narratives, offering up an impoverished free-market teleology still able to encourage “the illusion that the West has something no one else possesses–but which they ought to desire for themselves” (8). Despite the renewed capacity of modernity to simulate the aura of the principled past and the enthralling future, Jameson remains convinced of the trope’s hostility to both liberatory historicism and “the desire called Utopia” (215). Such spurs to systematic transformation can today only be found within the conceptual field of postmodernity, he stipulates, much as this field’s emergent enemy, the “recrudescence of the language of the modern,” is itself what Jameson, in a rare concession to American vernacular, calls “a postmodern thing” (7).
Jameson’s broad-brush offensive against the reappearance of philosophy, beauty, the market, and other modern curiosities can be commended on several grounds, including its desire to stretch self-critiques of the corporate university into bona fide ontologies of the intellectual present. Certain that a serious reading of capitalism’s latest chapters is required to unwrite them, Jameson effectively sidesteps Terry Eagelton’s recent put-downs of postmodernism’s market-type relativism and similar political sins, maintaining instead that their prevalence is one sign of a historical break into late capitalism that Marxists can neither refuse nor rewind. All the same, it’s difficult to understand, given the content of A Singular Modernity, just why we should trust in the superior insight of postmodernism’s explanation of the present; in essence, Jameson’s book mounts an ideology critique of the resurgent thematics of modernity from a postmodern perspective without presenting an argument for this perspective’s lesser distortion or greater interest. Jameson might point readers seeking such an argument to his famous 1991 book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; but where would he point those who question whether the cynical reason of university-based free-marketeers can really be the leading historical trigger for the return of the modern? Ironically, this proponent of always historicizing fails to historicize the coming of neomodernism beyond the realm of the political, or perhaps just the realm of academic politics. As a result, he forecloses the possibility that the rebirth of various “m”-words reflects postmodernism’s status as an incomplete project, a status especially visible in light of the same non-Euro-American “alternative modernities” that Jameson dismisses as hoaxes of Western neoliberalism.
“Transitional Modes,” the central section of A Singular Modernity, exposes what may be the unconfessed pragmatic reason for Jameson’s undeveloped explanation of the modern renewal. Here, rather than probing the ins, out, and origins of this renewal, he joins it, unfolding a baroque theory of the modern’s “aesthetic category or adaptation” in the form of an alternative Jamesonian modernism (95). Eventually, in the last pages of his book’s conclusion, Jameson gets around to justifying this extensive attention to aesthetic modernism per se, contending that the “corpus of modernist texts” is “uniquely useful in the elaboration and reconstruction of the various ideologies of modernity” (212). In “Transitional Modes” itself, however, the pleasure of revisiting modernist stylists as different as Paul de Man and Rubén Darío is its own alibi, and the challenge of beating revisionary descriptions of artistic modernism at their own game infuses the section with some of the old dialectical verve. Jameson begins part one by poking holes in nothing less than the central intellectual achievement of the “new modernist studies” hatched in U.S. and British English departments in the early 1990s: namely, the replacement of an insular high-modernist autonomy aesthetic with a dynamic model of the reciprocal relations among modernity, the historical situation; modernization, the social “process whereby we get there”; and modernism, the expressive “reaction to that situation and that process alike” (99). This new modernist model is “a good idea,” Jameson admits, but not an idea that the French, German, Spanish and other “national traditions” of modernism will allow (99). Once the
“modern,” a necessary fourth term loaded with contingency, enters the scene in its various national articulations, the great diversity of roads to modernism becomes clear, as does the lack of a modernist “dialectic…capable of coordinating the incommensurable conceptualities of the national-literary and the international” (101). Peter Osborne may claim that modernism is a term of translation across space as well time, but Jameson insists on the untranslatability of the different “moderns,” putting on a rapid-fire clinic in comparative literature to school a sympathetically materialist but narrowly Anglophone remapping of modernist territory.
With the centerpiece of the new modernist studies brought low, the remaining portions of “Transitional Modes” address a trio of diachronic concerns–periodization, narrativization, and depersonalization–that Jameson casts as “methodological corrections” to the entire history of modernist criticism (138). Part two briefly mounts an implicit Hegelian defense of Jameson’s hyper-digressive style–”truth can only be reached through error,” he reminds us (111)–but spends most of its energy trolling through de Man’s theory of allegory to establish why individual modernist texts themselves accept the Jamesonian maxim that “one cannot not periodize” (119). Reading such texts closely, Jameson concludes, is impossible “without at one and the same time activating the unsatisfactory generic operation of attempting to see them as examples…of some more general diachronic idea of modernism”–an idea of modernism that, for its part, “can have no other conceivable function than to return to the text itself” (119). The dialectic will have its way, it seems, even in the frustrating procedure of reading books into and out of cultural history and its unavoidably tropological constitution.
Part three of “Transitional Modes” shifts attention to the idea of innovation, which Jameson imagines is the embarrassingly technophilic narrative engine of most modernist historiography. Once again, Jameson opts to relocate a sweeping diachronic logic into the individual modernist work, proposing that each such work is “the frozen allegory of modernism as a whole and as a vast movement in time which no one can see or adequately represent” (125). In expressing both an “older technique or content”–realism, say–and its newer negation–abstraction, for example–modernist texts root modernism’s overarching “innovative mechanism” inside their own borders, thus permitting every discrete work in the modernist assembly to “make it new” in turn as readers experience particular performances of overwritten convention (128). Though Jameson strangely refuses to confess it, he thus recreates Ulysses and other modernist masterpieces in the image of Elvis Presley’s early Sun Sessions hit “Milkcow Blues Boogie.” As you’ll recall, the King here self-consciously dramatizes the invention of rock and roll from the traditional materials of country blues, interrupting, on the record, a too-slow introduction with the command “Hold it fellas, let’s get real, real gone for a change,” and then answering his avant-garde summons with a scream and a breakneck tempo. Presley, like Joyce and Jameson, knew that successful reception and survival of the modernist break rested on “our capacity to feel the innovative mechanism at work within the work of art itself” (128).
Part four, the last ingredient in “Transitional Modes,” presents no Elvis analogies, but ranges just as irresponsibly widely to recode Buddhism as “an anticipation of the wholly distinct adventure of modernism itself” (137). Jameson’s program of stuffing diachronic materials into tight synchronic spaces now mandates something like the interiorization of modernism’s well-known inward turn. Rather than reflecting a transition to depth psychologies, determination by the private unconscious, and related markers of the subjectification of reality, Jameson’s ideal-typical modernist work displays, in the symbolic action of its formal adventures, a will to desubjectification. “Any close inspection of the texts themselves will in fact betray a radical depersonalization of the bourgeois subject,” he guarantees us, “a programmatic movement away from the psychological and from personal identity itself” (135). No close inspection in fact follows Jameson’s assurance, at least in part because the three-movement dialectical rhythm of his thought quickly demands a projection of the formal traces of desubjectification onto the historical landscape of modernity, if only via the mediation of a modernist subjectivity that allegorizes “the transformation of the world itself, and therefore of what it called revolution” (136). The death of the sovereign subject once associated with postmodernism, not least in Jameson’s variety, is thus surprisingly backdated, forcibly linked both to modernism and to the very prospect of full-fledged revolution the subject’s extinction has usually been thought to foreclose.
In my simplifying rendition, though not always in Jameson’s prose itself, the immediate polemical investments of the “Transitional Modes” section are fairly distinct. Confronting the proudly historicist and materialist theories and styles of modernism that have chipped away at postmodernism’s appeal over the last decade, Jameson reminds us of the continued need to reckon with poststructuralist grievances against periods, movements, unidimensional causality and other customary tropes of literary history, however concrete. No less aggressively, he reiterates a fundamental moral of Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and much of his later work, advising a generation happy to have kicked the habit of modernist formalism that form is precisely the element of the aesthetic object most soaked in ideology and most susceptible to ideological criticism. Jameson’s lessons to modernist youth command respect, but, at least for me, raise a respectable question of their own: Does Jameson’s tendency to reroute the historical dynamism of the new modernist studies back inside the apparatus of the individual modernist text finally result in a neomodernism that outregresses that of his sworn enemies?
William J. Maxwell is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
A Non-Singular Jameson: A Singular Modernity
A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present New York: Verso, 2002
Even after all those glowing glass-box houses in recent Hollywood films; all those galleries, biennials, and art magazines boosting new and neo-abstractions; and all those meetings of the transatlantic Modernist Studies Association, it’s still a shock to see modernism revived on the portable stage sets of the Occupation Authority in Iraq. Who would have thought that the modernist intellectual denounced in so many passages of twentieth-century anti-totalitarianism–the philosopher-king/bureaucrat with a fetish for the Absolute, the Utopian, and the Ideological with a capital “I”–would survive the end of history in the form of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and assorted Straussian others, a circle who’ve made the prospect of military control of the Pentagon a liberal daydream? As it turns out, Fredric Jameson might have thought it, had he spent another year or so revising the German lectures he published in 2002 under the title A Singular Modernity, a text that declares itself part of the “antepenultimate volume” of his series The Poetics of Social Forms (iv). What Jameson apparently intends as “the theoretical section” of his next to next-to-last book protests the erosion of the analytical slogan of postmodernism, if not the evaporation of full postmodernity, the period of capitalist history he reinvented and personified for late-century historical materialists and graduate students everywhere (iv). Instead of “healthy movements of disgust and revulsion,…the very sound of windows breaking and old furniture being thrown out,” he complains, “we have begun in the last few years to witness…the return to and the reestablishment of all kinds of old [modernist] things,” the reinstallation, to extend Jameson’s decorative domestic metaphor, of grandma and grandpa’s Danish modern living-room set (1). Traditional philosophy, powered by its “hoariest subfields, such as ethics,” leads the parade of retrenchment, followed by the “older political economy” of the market, and trailed by a wrongfully resuscitated bourgeois aesthetics (2).
For the author of A Singular Modernity, the resurrection of the modernist intellectual within the fortified walls of the Pentagon and the Coalition Provisional Authority is likely no great surprise, given what he paints as the forces, relations, and corruptions that inspire the modern revival more generally. Jameson’s preface on the “Regressions of the Present Age” provides a grab-bag of causes for this revival, but leads with the case that the second victory of the modern is tied to the “defeat of Marxism” within an increasingly professionalized and privatized university, a defeat which “checked the flow of contemporary theory at its source,…[namely,] the Marxist problematic” (3). Postmodernity, first among purportedly Marxian graphs of the present, became a conservative target “when some of its nastier consequences–a retheorization of late capitalism, feminism, coming to terms with so-called `relativism’ and the constructedness of social reality–[were accurately perceived]” (7). As Jameson pictures it, the hibernating concept of modernity, like its equally aged cultural cousin, modernism, appealed to reactionary anti-postmodernists because it is at once traditional and dynamic. On the one hand, “modernity, which traces its lineage back to the founding fathers of sociology…seems respectable and academic enough” (7): more properly professorial, surely, than studies of difference and pastiche in Middlemarch and Madonna. On the other hand, modernity answers the need for a tale of global progress even after the collapse of radical grand narratives, offering up an impoverished free-market teleology still able to encourage “the illusion that the West has something no one else possesses–but which they ought to desire for themselves” (8). Despite the renewed capacity of modernity to simulate the aura of the principled past and the enthralling future, Jameson remains convinced of the trope’s hostility to both liberatory historicism and “the desire called Utopia” (215). Such spurs to systematic transformation can today only be found within the conceptual field of postmodernity, he stipulates, much as this field’s emergent enemy, the “recrudescence of the language of the modern,” is itself what Jameson, in a rare concession to American vernacular, calls “a postmodern thing” (7).
Jameson’s broad-brush offensive against the reappearance of philosophy, beauty, the market, and other modern curiosities can be commended on several grounds, including its desire to stretch self-critiques of the corporate university into bona fide ontologies of the intellectual present. Certain that a serious reading of capitalism’s latest chapters is required to unwrite them, Jameson effectively sidesteps Terry Eagelton’s recent put-downs of postmodernism’s market-type relativism and similar political sins, maintaining instead that their prevalence is one sign of a historical break into late capitalism that Marxists can neither refuse nor rewind. All the same, it’s difficult to understand, given the content of A Singular Modernity, just why we should trust in the superior insight of postmodernism’s explanation of the present; in essence, Jameson’s book mounts an ideology critique of the resurgent thematics of modernity from a postmodern perspective without presenting an argument for this perspective’s lesser distortion or greater interest. Jameson might point readers seeking such an argument to his famous 1991 book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; but where would he point those who question whether the cynical reason of university-based free-marketeers can really be the leading historical trigger for the return of the modern? Ironically, this proponent of always historicizing fails to historicize the coming of neomodernism beyond the realm of the political, or perhaps just the realm of academic politics. As a result, he forecloses the possibility that the rebirth of various “m”-words reflects postmodernism’s status as an incomplete project, a status especially visible in light of the same non-Euro-American “alternative modernities” that Jameson dismisses as hoaxes of Western neoliberalism.
“Transitional Modes,” the central section of A Singular Modernity, exposes what may be the unconfessed pragmatic reason for Jameson’s undeveloped explanation of the modern renewal. Here, rather than probing the ins, out, and origins of this renewal, he joins it, unfolding a baroque theory of the modern’s “aesthetic category or adaptation” in the form of an alternative Jamesonian modernism (95). Eventually, in the last pages of his book’s conclusion, Jameson gets around to justifying this extensive attention to aesthetic modernism per se, contending that the “corpus of modernist texts” is “uniquely useful in the elaboration and reconstruction of the various ideologies of modernity” (212). In “Transitional Modes” itself, however, the pleasure of revisiting modernist stylists as different as Paul de Man and Rubén Darío is its own alibi, and the challenge of beating revisionary descriptions of artistic modernism at their own game infuses the section with some of the old dialectical verve. Jameson begins part one by poking holes in nothing less than the central intellectual achievement of the “new modernist studies” hatched in U.S. and British English departments in the early 1990s: namely, the replacement of an insular high-modernist autonomy aesthetic with a dynamic model of the reciprocal relations among modernity, the historical situation; modernization, the social “process whereby we get there”; and modernism, the expressive “reaction to that situation and that process alike” (99). This new modernist model is “a good idea,” Jameson admits, but not an idea that the French, German, Spanish and other “national traditions” of modernism will allow (99). Once the
“modern,” a necessary fourth term loaded with contingency, enters the scene in its various national articulations, the great diversity of roads to modernism becomes clear, as does the lack of a modernist “dialectic…capable of coordinating the incommensurable conceptualities of the national-literary and the international” (101). Peter Osborne may claim that modernism is a term of translation across space as well time, but Jameson insists on the untranslatability of the different “moderns,” putting on a rapid-fire clinic in comparative literature to school a sympathetically materialist but narrowly Anglophone remapping of modernist territory.
With the centerpiece of the new modernist studies brought low, the remaining portions of “Transitional Modes” address a trio of diachronic concerns–periodization, narrativization, and depersonalization–that Jameson casts as “methodological corrections” to the entire history of modernist criticism (138). Part two briefly mounts an implicit Hegelian defense of Jameson’s hyper-digressive style–”truth can only be reached through error,” he reminds us (111)–but spends most of its energy trolling through de Man’s theory of allegory to establish why individual modernist texts themselves accept the Jamesonian maxim that “one cannot not periodize” (119). Reading such texts closely, Jameson concludes, is impossible “without at one and the same time activating the unsatisfactory generic operation of attempting to see them as examples…of some more general diachronic idea of modernism”–an idea of modernism that, for its part, “can have no other conceivable function than to return to the text itself” (119). The dialectic will have its way, it seems, even in the frustrating procedure of reading books into and out of cultural history and its unavoidably tropological constitution.
Part three of “Transitional Modes” shifts attention to the idea of innovation, which Jameson imagines is the embarrassingly technophilic narrative engine of most modernist historiography. Once again, Jameson opts to relocate a sweeping diachronic logic into the individual modernist work, proposing that each such work is “the frozen allegory of modernism as a whole and as a vast movement in time which no one can see or adequately represent” (125). In expressing both an “older technique or content”–realism, say–and its newer negation–abstraction, for example–modernist texts root modernism’s overarching “innovative mechanism” inside their own borders, thus permitting every discrete work in the modernist assembly to “make it new” in turn as readers experience particular performances of overwritten convention (128). Though Jameson strangely refuses to confess it, he thus recreates Ulysses and other modernist masterpieces in the image of Elvis Presley’s early Sun Sessions hit “Milkcow Blues Boogie.” As you’ll recall, the King here self-consciously dramatizes the invention of rock and roll from the traditional materials of country blues, interrupting, on the record, a too-slow introduction with the command “Hold it fellas, let’s get real, real gone for a change,” and then answering his avant-garde summons with a scream and a breakneck tempo. Presley, like Joyce and Jameson, knew that successful reception and survival of the modernist break rested on “our capacity to feel the innovative mechanism at work within the work of art itself” (128).
Part four, the last ingredient in “Transitional Modes,” presents no Elvis analogies, but ranges just as irresponsibly widely to recode Buddhism as “an anticipation of the wholly distinct adventure of modernism itself” (137). Jameson’s program of stuffing diachronic materials into tight synchronic spaces now mandates something like the interiorization of modernism’s well-known inward turn. Rather than reflecting a transition to depth psychologies, determination by the private unconscious, and related markers of the subjectification of reality, Jameson’s ideal-typical modernist work displays, in the symbolic action of its formal adventures, a will to desubjectification. “Any close inspection of the texts themselves will in fact betray a radical depersonalization of the bourgeois subject,” he guarantees us, “a programmatic movement away from the psychological and from personal identity itself” (135). No close inspection in fact follows Jameson’s assurance, at least in part because the three-movement dialectical rhythm of his thought quickly demands a projection of the formal traces of desubjectification onto the historical landscape of modernity, if only via the mediation of a modernist subjectivity that allegorizes “the transformation of the world itself, and therefore of what it called revolution” (136). The death of the sovereign subject once associated with postmodernism, not least in Jameson’s variety, is thus surprisingly backdated, forcibly linked both to modernism and to the very prospect of full-fledged revolution the subject’s extinction has usually been thought to foreclose.
In my simplifying rendition, though not always in Jameson’s prose itself, the immediate polemical investments of the “Transitional Modes” section are fairly distinct. Confronting the proudly historicist and materialist theories and styles of modernism that have chipped away at postmodernism’s appeal over the last decade, Jameson reminds us of the continued need to reckon with poststructuralist grievances against periods, movements, unidimensional causality and other customary tropes of literary history, however concrete. No less aggressively, he reiterates a fundamental moral of Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and much of his later work, advising a generation happy to have kicked the habit of modernist formalism that form is precisely the element of the aesthetic object most soaked in ideology and most susceptible to ideological criticism. Jameson’s lessons to modernist youth command respect, but, at least for me, raise a respectable question of their own: Does Jameson’s tendency to reroute the historical dynamism of the new modernist studies back inside the apparatus of the individual modernist text finally result in a neomodernism that outregresses that of his sworn enemies?
William J. Maxwell is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign