A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (Radical Thinkers) [Paperback] [2013] 1 Ed. Fredric Jameson

by Fredric Jameson

A major interpretation of the concepts of modernism and modernityThe concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this new 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 new 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.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Art, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Cultural, Criticism

Paperback

First published November 1, 2002

About the author

Fredric Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

Reviews

[Anastasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Μοντερνισμός, νεωτερικότητα, εκσυγχρονισμός, χρονικότητα, μετανεωτερικότητα, μεταμοντερνισμός, αφήγηση, περιοδολόγηση...είναι μερικοί απ' τους όρους που προσεγγίζει και των οποίων το νόημα επιχειρεί να αναλύσει ο Fredric Jameson τόσο από φιλοσοφική και κοινωνιολογική όσο και από ιστορική πλευρά. Λίγο δύσκολο βιβλίο στην ανάγνωση, πράγμα λογικό όμως, αν αναλογιστούμε και τις έννοιες τις οποίες πραγματεύεται.

"Οι οντολογίες του παρόντος απαιτούν αρχαιολογίες του μέλλοντος, όχι προγνώσεις του παρελθόντος"

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can't sum up any Jameson book in a blurb. Whatever your familiarity with the topic, he will broaden and deepen it. Jameson is always difficult but never obscure or merely evocative. You must read everything twice: once to discover the terrain, again to cognitively map it.

[Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jameson has staked out the space as a leading theorist of late modernity. He returns to it here, after the academic debates over post modernism had faded from currency.

This work does the service of theorizing and deconstructing the several narratives of modernity and late (post) modernity and the breaks or ruptures posited by other theorists in constructing these narratives. E.g Giddens, Habermas, Lyotard, etc. He also does a fine if at times esoteric job of conceptualizing the aesthetics of modernism.

However I feel a diminishing return on these discussions of modernity. The conversation is starting to feel old hat. Fashions come and go and perhaps this will come around again and will feel timely all over again. In the meantime conversations around late capitalism and advanced industrial society seem more informative and more productive.

[Bren · Rating 4 out of 5]

the forms of this allegory are multiple; yet...have in common that they evoke a momentum that cannot find resolution within the self, but that must be completed by a Utopian and revolutionary transmutation of the world

[Carlos Valladares · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn good analysis, damn good.

“In the present context, the task would insist in showing everything that is energizing and active about a depersonalizing tendency that has too often been discussed in terms of loss and incapacitation, in demonstrating how such a renunciation of subjectivity, far from amounting to some resignation to an impossible ‘alienating’ condition, stands on the contrary as an original and productive response to it.”

Say it louder for the people in the back, Cool Hand Freddy!!!

[E. C. Koch · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am not the world's biggest Jameson fan, so I want it known up front that I'm, admittedly, biased. And I harbor these criticisms because I think he belongs to the twin academic schools of "obscurer is better" and "why say in ten words what I can say in a hundred?" both of which are eternally irksome to me. But so then why do I (we) continue to read him? Well, because he's a critical eminence and a massive thinker who has apparently read everything, leaving us with A Singular Modernity. This text is divided into two parts, the first laying out the four maxims of modernism - "one cannot not periodize," "modernism is not a concept but rather a narrative category," "only situations [and not subjectivities] of modernity can be narrated," and "no 'theory' of modernity today makes sense unless it comes to terms with a postmodern break with the modern" - and the second expounding on the ideology of modernism. I find with Jameson that few things are certain, but one certainty here is that periods require "breaks" with whatever precedes them and Modernism's break is as yet ill-defined. So we are treated to a tour of the different breaks commonly argued for Modernism - the alienation/fragmentation of the subject, the doctrine to Make it New, the subverted belief in technological progress - none of which, for Fred, really fit the bill. Rather, and this is where Jameson's opacity frustrates, Modernism's break occurs when (borrowing from Perry Anderson) Western culture finds itself in a position of social-technological-political potentiality combined with the signifier's new understanding of itself as arbitrary (we're talking Saussure here, not Derrida) combined with a renewed taboo for existing textual methods of representation (borrowing from Adorno). Not an especially succinct event. Following this, the ideology of Modernism, perhaps also anti-climactically, is not contemporaneous with high-Modern works, but is actually the conception of late-modern/early-postmodern critics. What we're left with is the assertion that Modern artists didn't have an understanding of themselves as Modern artists, that that designation was applied to them later by "late-modernists," which to me doesn't feel particularly earth-shattering. I did like the short explication of how Modernism ostensibly breaks with the preceding aesthetic mode - realism - but how really Modernism must carry with it a germ of realism in order to present itself as Modernist, leading to the argument that "realism" is really an epistemological category, not an aesthetic one, and so Modernism and realism don't compete with each other but mirror one another without intersecting. At the end of the whole everything, no part of this thrilled me - I'm not even sure what his position on postmodernism is after reading this - but, alas, it's Jameson, so we keep reading.

[Gary Reger · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's no debating that Jameson is a hard read. His occasionally convoluted prose poses a challenge. Nor is it easy to summarize his argument and conclusions, at least for me. In general, Jameson is seeking to define modernity as an outcome, in part, of the explosion of technology in the later nineteenth century, which transformed bourgeois life and created a 'break" which marked the transformation into modernity (see p. 145). That also echoed on artistic production, both literature and the fine arts, with multiple tentacles of new developments, running from Surrealism to Cubism. His final conclusion is that "what we call artistic or aesthetic 'modernism' essentially corresponds to a situation of incomplete modernization" (p. 141) and that modernism is an "ideology," by which he means, in part, the emergence in America of New Criticism as a methodology of interpretation (p. 169).

I should add that he sees other "breaks" that created past "modernisms," notably the ideas propounded by Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes. But he rejects these older modernisms as fundamentally different from the more recent, through which we have lived.

The inspirations for Jameson's views about modernism derive from a number of sources. Perhaps most important, though only mentioned briefly, is Five Faces of Modernism by Matei Calinescu (2nd edition 1987). He expounds at length on others, notably Theodor Adorno.

[Leonidas Vergos]

Ένα χρήσιμο κι ενδιαφέρον ανάγνωσμα από τον μεγάλο Φρέντρικ Τζέιμσον. Αυτός ο τόμος της "Ποιητικής των κοινωνικών μορφών" επικεντρώνεται στις διάφορες μορφές του νεωτερικού και στον λόγο που έχει αναπτυχθεί για αυτόν, με έμφαση στις λογοτεχνικές του εκφράσεις αλλά όχι μόνο. Η παρούσα μελέτη του νεωτερικού αποτελεί οργανικό μέρος ενός κολάζ με αναφορά στη σχετική θεματολογία εκ μέρους του μαζί με τα περίφημα γραπτά του περί μετανεωτερικότητας.
Μετά τη μελέτη του νεωτερικού παρόντος, ο συγγραφέας στρέφεται αναγκαστικά στην εξέταση (πολιτισμικά, κοινωνικά αλλά κυρίως πολιτικά) του μέλλοντος:

"Οι Οντολογίες του παρόντος απαιτούν Αρχαιολογίες του μέλλοντος, όχι προγνώσεις του παρελθόντος."

[Cobi · Rating 5 out of 5]

you should read it!

[brenda tan · Rating 5 out of 5]

probably jameson at his least confusing

[Soph Nova · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the four maxims and this was a good intro, excited to dive more into Jameson thought!

[Samir Mechel · Rating 4 out of 5]

An underrated banger! All parts worth reading.

[Anthony Crupi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Freddy's syntax is at its most impenetrable/labyrinthine here, and in Part One this tendency is downright rebarbative. Closes out with an uncharacteristically dopey fumbling of Beckett.

[Shawn Kubiak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good theories. I need more time to mull over it

[Ziad · Rating 3 out of 5]

In A Singular Modernity, Jameson unravels the political and philosophical implications in the term modernity and its aesthetic relation to modernism. As such, he presents an ideology of modernism that is ruled by the autonomization of the aesthetic. What this autonomization entails is a divorce of the aesthetic from the cultural, a move which Jameson exemplifies in Blanchot wherein: “Each of the these concepts – anxiety and the Terror – has already achieved a thorough-going purification of that extrinsic outside world in which it operates: the variety of human feelings and emotions is obliterated in its difference and into an intense consciousness of freedom that has no content…” (188). According to Jameson, this disassociation is that of the disassociation of Art from Culture, in itself due feeling “a malaise in the face of this blurring of the boundaries, an anxiety about the indeterminacy in which it necessarily leaves the work of art itself” (178). Thus, it is made in the name of protecting art, to purify it and sharpen block its pores against the osmosis-function which culture enables between Art and real life. Ironically, however, this “ideology of modernism”, as it claims materiality and immanence, also opens up room for spirituality, and even dogmatism.
Interesting here is Jameson’s semi-defense of Kant whereby he absolves Kant from nourishing this ideology of modernism, that is to say, he underplays Kant’s influence on such an ideology. The difference lies in external differentiation which Kant argues for between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic. The Ideologues of Late Modernism, however, differentiate the aesthetic from culture itself, thus bringing about a complete separation of Art from real life. This complete separation is particularly so since Culture here acts as a mediation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic. With the breaking away from the mediator, Art is presented as mutually exclusive, independent, and indeed autonomous from culture and real life.
In that sense, it is this blurring of the totality, or of the need to translate codes which explains Jameson’s tackling of the ideology of modernism. In other words, the Ideology of Modernism betrays the four maxims of modernity that Jameson lays down:
1. It does not periodize since Later Modernism attempts to be ahistorical, atemporal through absolute autonomization.
2. Late Modernism repudiates “narrative” through the advocating of the absolute materiality of language in Poetic Language.
3. Late Modernism’s divorce of aesthetics from culture and the consequent loss of any mediation to real life leads to an abandonment of any situation through which to narrativize and analyze.
4. As such, it does not “come to terms with the hypothesis of a postmodern break with the modern” even though, postmodernism acknowledges the break it effects as a break precisely with this late modernism.

So what we end up with is that modernism cannot be defended as a concept, but should be approached with an open-ended analysis which will be inevitably be refuted, as it is self-negated as it develops.

[Steve Llano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jameson provides a perfect model for intellectually rich and rigorous analysis and critique while remaining conversational, engaging, fluid and somewhat accessible. This book is a wonderful petitio to the question "what is the proper response to postmodernism from a Marxist?" Instead of answering this question, Jameson engages in the petitio: "What is a proper understanding of modernity?" He argues that postmodernists and their supporters are addressing a very old, original split of moderns from classicists. They are not addressing modernity as it is today - which at first glance is quite a fragmented collection of ideas. Jameson traces the intellectual development of modernism in order to create one that makes sense based on the work of those who are modernist, that is not a top down universal demand that a modernist should be this or that. He articulates a vision of what a valuable conception of modernism would be as well as what it would look like to practice it from a technical, artistic, and intellectual point of view.

The book is really great. A very rewarding experience that makes you think differently about various conceptions in modernism, as well as the value of modernism as a conceptual category. It also makes you realize how thin of a conception postmodernism is if it is based on a reading of modernism that does not consider the way modernism has travelled in intellectual history. The major take away for me was the idea that modernism is an internalization of historicity by the rhetor/artist, rather than a set of propositions or values or periodization attempts (this not that old thing, that, not this new thing). His read of Greenberg is brilliant as well. I recommend it, really thoughtful, but it's good to have a conception of the major arguments of modernity and postmodernity, as well as the Marxist position on both before you launch into this.

[Mr. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frederic Jameson has established himself as one of the leading interpreters of 'Post modernism' over the years, but in this work he turns his attention to a history of the modern. By outlining the variegated meanings and understanding's of the modern, from the Cartesian Cogito, to Marx's Capital, Jameson attempts to reach a coherent and comprehensive understanding of the period itself. However, Jameson falls into web of philosophical and ideological narratives from which he cannot remove himself. Aside from some insightful criticism's of Foucault's 'Episteme,' this work is a confused and superficial work of historiography.

[Humphrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jameson's book does an excellent job of distinguishing the loosely-constructed popular idea of modernism from the historical realities - 'realities' because there wasn't, of course, just one modernism. If you think a two-hundred page book is too much for developing the theoretical ideas separating retrospective expansion from actual practice, well, this might get a little annoying. Otherwise, it reads fairly clearly and briskly enough.

[Leonardo]

En su libro sobre modernidad, Frederic Jameson se refiere a la "universalidad concreta" hegeliana en su concisa crítica de las recientes teorías de moda acerca de las "modernidades alternativas"...

Visión de Paralaje Pág.53

[Curtis Anthony Bozif · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book way before I was ready to. I should like to say that one day I'll go back and read it again. Until then.

C.

[Matt Longman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wanna read a book that makes your mind twist, uses lots of words you don't know, and reminds you of the English Major you never got? Read this.

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and useful concepts, but little effort to make them easy to understand or even fun to read.

[A L]

High modernism was stuck relying on patronage instead of the market to do its experiments, but it's late modernism that formulated the ideology of aesthetic autonomy.

[Andreia · Rating 5 out of 5]

In A Singular Modernity, Fredric Jameson circles around the words "modern" and "modernism," asking what they mean and what they actually apply to. It's a steep, dense read; he needs a certain critical mass of material to support his relentless disassembling and reassembling, his historical and political contextualizing, his rotations and juxtapositions in intellectual hyperspace. His writing is very meta: not so much about the subject, or even how to approach the subject, but how to approach the various approaches, their usefulness, their possibilites. The intellectual project of the book is itself the real subject, or rather the production of intellectual projects that are all the more stimulating for being sketches or glimpses.

Your reaction to the book will depend on your reaction to its textual surface. The implied reader is a fearfully educated and up-to-date academic, and Jameson is at pains not to insult their intelligence by telling them anything that, in this audience, everybody already knows. At one point a discussion of realism requires him to mention Don Quixote, but this is such a cliched reference he can only make an apologetic allusion to "that Spanish work." But the book can be read against this intention, without knowing every word or recognizing every name, without being intimidated by Jameson's erudition. The text can be navigated like science fiction, as indirect exposition, the unfamiliar explained by context or allowed to stand unresolved as focii of curiosity. It is an educational and mind-stretching book.