A Singular Modernity

Essay on the Ontology of the Present

Fredric Jameson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781781680223
• eBook ISBN: 9781784780067
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Teoría crítica

The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this intervention, Fredric Jameson-perhaps the most influential and persuasive theorist of postmodernity-excavates and explores these notions in a fresh and illuminating manner.The extraordinary revival of discussions of modernity, as well as of new theories of artistic modernism, demands attention in its own right. It seems clear that the (provisional) disappearance of alternatives to capitalism plays its part in the universal attempt to revive 'modernity' as a social ideal. Yet the paradoxes of the concept illustrate its legitimate history and suggest some rules for avoiding its misuse as well.
In this major interpretation of the problematic, Jameson concludes that both concepts are tainted, but nonetheless yield clues as to the nature of the phenomena they purported to theorize. His judicious and vigilant probing of both terms-which can probably not be banished at this late date-helps us clarify our present political and artistic situations.

PART I

The Four Maxims of Modernity

1

‘Modernity’ as a concept is so often associated with modernity that it comes as something of a shock to find the word ‘modern’ in use as far back as the fifth century AD.¹ In the usage of Pope Gelasius I (494/5) it simply distinguishes the contemporaries from the older period of the Church fathers, and implies no particular privilege (save the chronological one) for the present. Present and immediate past are here in continuity, both of them sharply distinguished from that unique historical time in which witnesses saw Jesus alive. So far, then, the Latin modernus simply means ‘now’ or ‘the time of the now’, thereby replicating Greek, which has no equivalent for modernus as such.² Yet in the work of Cassiodorus, writing at much the same time, after the conquest of Rome by the Goths, the term has acquired a new overtone. For modernus, in the thought of this essentially literary scholar, now knows a substantive antithesis, in what Cassiodorus terms antiquas. From the Pope’s standpoint, the new Gothic empire scarcely marked a break in the Christian theological tradition; for the man of letters, it signifies a fundamental dividing line between a henceforth classical culture and a present whose historic task lies in reinventing that culture. It is this break that is crucial in the endowment of the term ‘modern’ with the specific meaning it has continued to bear down to our own time. Nor does it matter that for Cassiodorus the term is freighted with the melancholy of Epigonentum, while for the various Renaissances (the Carolingian as well as those of the twelfth century and of Burckhardt’s Italy) the new historic mission is taken up with exultation.

What is at stake here is the distinction between novus and modernus, between new and modern. Can we sort this out by observing that everything modern is necessarily new, while everything new is not necessarily modern? This is, it seems to me, to differentiate between a personal and a collective (or historical) chronology; between the events of individual experience and the implicit or explicit recognition of moments in which a whole collective temporality is tangibly modified.

In the case of the new, the thus predicated subject is distinguished from its predecessors as an (isolated) individual with no particular reference or consequence; in the case of the modern, it is grasped in connection with a series of analogous phenomena and contrasted with a closed and vanished phenomenal world of a different type.³

What role does the existence of the new word play in the consciousness of this distinction? For the structural lexicologists of this tradition,⁴ the availability of distinct terms and variants is certainly a fundamental precondition: ‘where no specific differentiation of a field is available, no radically different temporal space can be delimited either’.⁵ Yet causality is not thereby assigned, nor does it have to be: we can imagine the proliferation of terms in one space, and their appropriation by some emergent consciousness in another.

However, it is crucial at this stage not to underestimate the anomalous dynamics of a word like modernus. We have at least two competing models for the comprehension of such a term. The first offers to deal with it in the framework of temporal categories, which eventually resolve themselves into those of the tenses as such (future, future anterior, perfective past, imperfective past, etcetera). We can then, with Reinhart Kosselek,⁶ generate a history of ideas in which the emergence of new time-words is evidence for a narrative about the evolution of historical consciousness. Philosophically, however, this approach founders on the antinomies of temporality itself, about which it has authoritatively been said that ‘it is always too late to speak about time’.⁷

The other obvious model, which approaches the problem not from the side of meaning and consciousness but from the side of the material signs themselves, is that of linguistics. It can be argued that ‘modern’ demands to be ranged under the category of what Jesperson called ‘shifters’:⁸ namely those empty vehicles of ‘deixis’ or reference to the context of the enunciation, whose meaning and content vary from speaker to speaker throughout time. Such are the pronouns (I, me and you), the words for place (here and there), and of course the time-words as well (now and then). In fact, well before modern linguistics, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit famously opens with a discussion of precisely such shifters, which as he points out might at first seem the most concrete words of all, until we grasp their portable variability.⁹ Yet shifters exist, however incoherent they may be philosophically; and the well-known case of yesterday’s ‘modern’ fashions suggested that the term ‘modern’ might well be included among them. In that case, however, the paradoxes of the modern are reduced to those of the merely new; and the existence of shifters in every known language tends to deprive our current object of inquiry of even that historicality that it was the merit of the preceding model to have underscored.

Yet the internal contradictions of both approaches, while disqualifying them in the absolute, tend also to suggest some fundamental ambiguity in that object itself (which may well therefore impose a set of procedural measures and precautions). Jauss’s magisterial overview suggests two further developments in the history of the concept of modernity which heighten that suspicion even further and demand to be taken into account before some final evaluation.

One is the emergent distinction between what Jauss calls ‘cyclical’ and ‘typological’ versions of the modern.¹⁰ We are certainly familiar with cyclical thinking when it comes to historical moments like the Renaissance (‘Maintenant toutes disciplines sont restituées, les langues instaurées’);¹¹ it is less obvious that the category of the ‘generation’ always brings a certain cyclical movement with it, while at the same time requiring intense collective self-consciousness about the identity and uniqueness of the period in question (generally, as in the 1960s, felt to be revolutionary in a specific way that identifies the content of the ‘cyclical’ return).

Meanwhile, by the ‘typological’, Jauss means not only the sense in which a given period feels itself to be fulfilling or completing a moment in the past (as when the New Testament completes the figural anticipations of the Old). This relationship certainly holds for the Renaissance or for the positions of the so-called modernists in the ‘Querelle des anciens et des modernes’: but is less evidently relevant for situations of simple emulation or imitation, as in Cassiodorus’s reverence for the literature of paganism, or the respect for the past of the twelfth-century moderni, who famously thought of themselves as dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. Yet, as the history of the Querelle itself demonstrates, the felt inferiority or superiority of present over past may be less important than the establishment of an identification between two historical moments, an identification that can be evaluated either way.

There is, however, a further incoherence here: namely that, when we look at the opposition more closely, its two poles seem to vanish into one another; and the cyclical proves to be fully as typological, in this sense, as the typological is cyclical. The distinction is therefore to be reformulated in another, less evident way: in reality, it involves a kind of Gestalt alternation between two forms of perception of the same object, the same moment in historical time. It seems to me that the first perceptual organization (the one identified as ‘cyclical’) is better described as an awareness of history invested in the feeling of a radical break; the ‘typological’ form consists rather in the attention to a whole period, and the sense that our (‘modern’) period is somehow analogous to this or that period in the past. A shift of attention must be registered in passing from one perspective to the other, however complementary they may seem to be: to feel our own moment as a whole new period in its own right is not exactly the same as focusing on the dramatic way in which its originality is set off against an immediate past.

The other opposition noted by Jauss can then serve to complete and to clarify this one. It is an opposition that historically contrasts the characterizations of ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’, but which can also be found to have a more general significance. To be sure, when late romanticism comes to feel dissatisfaction with what is still perceived to be a reactive stance against the classical, then the concept of modernité is born, and Baudelaire mints a usage that is presumably still with us, and whose signal advantage seems to lie in its new-found independence from all such historical oppositions and antitheses.

But even this development is dependent on changes marked by the coming into being of the category of the classical itself, which no longer coincides with what used to be identified as ‘antiquity’ (or ‘les anciens’). It is a momentous development, in which a good deal of the nostalgia and the fascination with the past, along with the pain of the Epigone’s inferiority, have fallen away. Indeed, the most dramatic moment in Jauss’s narrative of the fortunes of ‘modernus’ comes precisely at this point: when the ‘quarrel’ between the ancients and the moderns as it were unravels and undoes itself, and both sides unexpectedly come to the same conviction, namely that the terms in which the judgement is to be adjudicated – the superiority or not of antiquity, the inferiority or not of the present and of the modern times – are unsatisfactory. The conclusion on both sides is then that the past, and antiquity, is neither superior nor inferior, but simply different. This is the moment of the birth of historicity itself: and the historically new consciousness of historical difference as such now reshuffles the deck and leaves us with a new word for the present’s opposite: the classical, which Stendhal will then virtually at once describe as the modernity (or the ‘romanticism’) of this or that moment of the past.¹² Jauss concludes his narrative at this point, only touching in passing on that other indispensable dimension of historicity, which is the future. Yet the future’s inevitable judgement on both our past and the actuality of our own present – already evoked by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre in 1735¹³ – will play an equally significant role in our own dealings with the modern and modernity.

2

It is now time to draw some provisional formal conclusions before examining some of the most current and widespread theories of modernity today. What we have tried to isolate is a dialectic of the break and the period, which is itself a moment of some wider dialectic of continuity and rupture (or, in other words, of Identity and Difference). For the latter process is dialectical in that it cannot be arrested and ‘solved’ in and for itself, but generates ever new forms and categories. I have observed elsewhere that the choice between continuity and rupture is something like an absolute historiographic beginning, that cannot be justified by the nature of the historical material or evidence, since it organizes all such material and evidence in the first place.¹⁴ But of course every such choice or grounding can itself be reconstructed as a simple fact which demands its own prehistory and generates its own causalities: in this case, the simplest version would underscore the taste of our own period and postmodernity in general for breaks rather than continuities, for decisionism rather than tradition. One could go on to evoke the temporalities of late capitalism, its reduction to the present, the loss of the sense of history and continuity, and so forth. It is at least minimally clear that this establishment of a new chain of causality involves in fact the construction of a new narrative (with a rather different starting point than that of the historiographic problem from which we began).

This situation, in which new narratives and new starting points are generated out of the limits and the starting points of older ones, may also be suggestive of the new dialectical moment we want to consider now, namely the dialectic of the break and the period. What is at stake here is a twofold movement, in which the foregrounding of continuities, the insistent and unwavering focus on the seamless passage from past to present, slowly turns into a consciousness of a radical break; while at the same time the enforced attention to a break gradually turns the latter into a period in its own right.

Thus, the more we seek to persuade ourselves of the fidelity of our own projects and values with respect to the past, the more obsessively do we find ourselves exploring the latter and its projects and values, which slowly begin to form into a kind of totality and to dissociate themselves from our own present as the living moment in the continuum. This is of course the moment of the latecomers’ melancholy reverence and the inferiority into which our own late moderns have long since passed.

At that point, then, simple chronology becomes periodization, and the past comes before us as a complete historical world to which we can take any number of existential attitudes. This is no doubt the moment most often called historicism; and it becomes productive, no doubt, only when the stance so energetically defined by Schelling becomes available:

How few people really know what a past is: There can in fact be no past without a powerful present, a present achieved by the disjunction [of our past] from ourselves. That person incapable of confronting his or her own past antagonistically really can be said to have no past; or better still, he never gets out of his own past, and lives perpetually within it still.¹⁵

Schelling thus here isolates a unique moment, in which the past is created by way of its energetic separation from the present; by way of a powerful act of dissociation whereby the present seals off its past from itself and expels and ejects it; an act without which neither present nor past truly exist, the past not yet fully constituted, the present still a living on within the force field of a past not yet over and done with.

It is this vital energy of the present and its violent self-creation that not only overcomes the stagnant melancholies of the epigones, it also assigns a mission to a temporal and historical period which ought not yet to have the right to be one. For the present is not yet a historical period: it ought not to be able to name itself and characterize its own originality. Yet it is precisely this unauthorized self-affirmation that will finally shape that new thing we call actuality, and for various forms of which our contemporary usage of modern and modernity are made to stand. For Jauss, we do not meet this stage of history until Romanticism (let us say that with Baudelaire ‘late romanticism’ produces the concept of modernité as a way of throwing off its own Epigonentum with respect to Romanticism proper); nor does the Renaissance exactly meet these requirements, since it is still turn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Preface: Regressions of the Current Age
• Part I - The Four Maxims of Modernity
• Transitional Modes
• Part II - Modernism as Ideology
• Conclusion: ‘Il faut être absolument moderne!’
• Notes