Jameson's Four Maxims: A Singular Modernity

A Singular Modernity, or Jameson’s Four Maxims

the term itself: “everything modern is necessarily new, while everything new is not necessarily modern” (18)

First Maxim:

We cannot not periodize.

“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 the past to the present, slowly turns into the 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” (24)

Second Maxim:

Modernity is not a concept, philosophically or otherwise, but a narrative category.

“the ‘correct’ theory of modernity is not to be obtained by putting [the origins of modernity] together in some hierarchical synthesis....what we have to do with here are narrative options and alternate storytelling possibilities, as which even the most scientific-looking and structural of purely sociological concepts can always be unmasked” (32)

Third Maxim:

The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated.

“It is not to be understood as an ontological proposition, that is, it does not affirm that no such thing as subjectivity exists. It is rather a proposition about the limits of representation as such, and means simply that we have no way of talking about subjectivity or consciousness that is not already somehow figural” (55-6)

Fourth Maxim:

No ‘theory’ of modernity makes sense today unless it is able to come to terms with the hypothesis of a postmodern break with the modern.

“[there] is at least one clear dividing line between the modern and the postmodern, namely, the refusal of concepts of self-consciousness, reflexivity, irony or self-reference in the postmodern aesthetic and also in postmodern values and philosophy as such, if there can be said to be such a thing. I imagine this also coincides with the disappearance of the slogan of freedom, whether in its bourgeois or anarchist sense” (92-3)

Points of reference:
“As for the ontology of the present, however, it is best to accustom oneself to thinking of ‘the ,odern’ as a one dimensional concept ... Foucalt, Les Mots et les Choses which has nothing of historicity or futuricity about it. .... Radical Descartes, Meditations alternatives, systematic transformations, cannot be theorized Heidegger, Nietzsche; Basic Writings or even imagined within the conceptual field governed by the Weber, The Protestant Ethic word ‘modern’” (215)



Annotated Bibliography

Chefdor, Monique. “Modernism: Babel Revisited?”, Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives. Ed. Monique Chefdor, R. Quinones, A. Wachtel. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1986. 1-6

This article focusses on the confusion surrounding the term ‘modernism’ itlsef. Anglo-American critics capitalize the word, as it symbolizes a “historically and conceptually defined movement in literature and arts”, while continental critics do not, as they see the term as a catch-all for the numerous ‘isms’ or movements of the “period”; the latter prefer ‘modernité’. There is also dispute amongst Latin-American critics: for some modernismo refers to a type of symbolism, whereas for others it is the avant-guard reaction against symbolism. Chefdor points out that the use of terms like ‘High Modernism’ demarcates a certain tension in the umbrella term to contain the varieties of artistic expression for the “period” in question.

Chiari, Joseph. The Aesthetics of Modernism. London: Vision P, 1970.

An older volume specifically chosen to demonstrate the narrative of history countered by Jameson, leading from Aquinas’s critique or Aristotle, through the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment (specifically the Copernican revolution) which increased the trend toward secularism and the immanence of the human subject (Cartesian self-awareness), to late-eighteenth century nihilism of Nietzsche and Baudelaire. Chiari seems halfway to Jameson’s ‘truth’ in his statement that “every age is a kaleidoscope of conflicting elements, rationalized and categorized into shapes, according to the sensibility, taste, and fashion of the day” (16).

Frisby, David. Fragments of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity P, 1985. 1-37.

In this section, Frisby looks at the paradoxes inherent in the critical study of the modernist project. He begins by quoting Lyotard’s implicit coordination of modernism with fascism, and that the failure of such a project is precisely the destructured forms of post-modernity. The first ‘phase’ of modernity Frisby describes as Baudelaire’s flaneur seeing himself continually anew in the masses; the artist must look to the ‘now’ rather than an eternal timelessness in the past. The second ‘phase’ emerges with a sense of history impacting upon consciousness; the ‘cult of the self’ was reified in the aestheticization and decadence of the late 19th century. Frisby then summarizes Marx’s main works, perhaps best with the phrase: “the commodity form not merely symbolizes social relations of modernity, it is a central source of their origin” (22). Modernité in the materialist sense is the continuous production of new commodities, which serves to distract the masses from the reproduction of the same fundamental relations of production – thus it is an inversion of the conception of modernist aesthetics, namely as an everchanging signifier for permanence, and thus ironically it is itself transitory. Frisby then sides with Nietzsche in believing that art serves as a counterculture for such forms of human decadence. Art is the examination of every minute moment as representing the eternal.

Isaak, Jo Anna. The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P,
1986.

Examines the two notions of modernism popular at the book’s publication, namely ➀ self-consciousness is equal to an artistic gesture towards non-representationalism, ➁ self-consciousness equal to intense realism. She then posits Joyce’s Ulysses as a text which contains both the art of style (non-realistic representation) and the art of (realistic) representation. Isaak then continues her examination of the modern with a one-hundred page critique of the conflation of the visual and literary arts. This inter-media fusion of aesthetic influences reflects Marinetti’s dictum: “There is no such thing as painting, sculpture, music, or poetry; there is only creation!”

Larsen, Neil. Modernism and Hegemony. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. 3-31

Larsen begins by invoking Jameson’s afterword in Aesthetics and Politics where Realism and Modernism are conjoined within a single hermeneutic process. He then himself problematizes this, stating that such a creation does not explain “the specific appropriateness of an aesthetics of representation as such to the problem of history” (5). Larsen falls back on Adorno’s position that one cannot truly represent any historical occurrence, for that precise re-presentation brackets its subject in an entirely different manner – which a priori reveals what was not there and hides what was – in other words, aesthetic realism is the realism of the singular representation, not of the subject in its original authenticity. A similar extension can be made with Jameson’s beliefs concerning ‘periodization’, namely that one cannot not periodize, and thus the past is solely the present seen a a specific manner, and consequently the term ‘Modernism’ cannot truly signify the totality of occurrences in art during the 20th century. Thus the power of naming is displaced from the agency of culture producers to culture readers who then rewrite their own history as anterior fact. The empowered subject represents itself in modern art by means of a fissure or crisis in representation, whether that of style or content; in political terms, art redeems the failure of the proletariat by opening up fissures “in a history without revolutionary agencies”.