SM01: No Not Like That

Jameson on the Return of Modernity, Me on the Return of This Substack

hey all. if you’ll indulge me a bit I wanted to start this one with a quick note about the future of this newsletter. I basically have two ideas here:

The Poetics of Social Forms

We’re doing it folks. Real Jamesonheads out there will know that Postmodernism was actually just one instalment of a pretty ambitious six volume project known as the Poetics of Social Forms. The longterm plan for this newsletter is to cover the rest of the volumes in order of publication, with the hope that the long anticipated first volume (currently, and in my view perfectly, titled Parts of Speech), will probably be published posthumously eventually. Though even if it’s not ever published, there’s a ton of stuff to cover here, so I think this will serve as a pretty good structuring mechanism for the newsletter for the foreseeable future. I’ve read I think three of the four published parts of PoSF (technically that’s four separate books, as A Singular Modernity and The Modernist Papers collectively constitute vol. IV) but not nearly as closely as I’ve now read Postmodernism, and I know I haven’t read the book on science fiction, so I’m looking forward to digging into all of them and trying to map out this whole big set of texts. We’ll start with A Singular Modernity, the preface of which I’ve written about below, hopefully to build a little momentum for next week. Ha ha!

Assorted Musings on Fiction and Maybe Some Other Stuff As Well

While the Poetics of Social Forms is going to be the big overarching project, I’m also hereby announcing my intention to occasionally do some writing about other books I like on here. This is going to be less systematic than the Jameson coverage, but I am lately catching myself having Occasional Opinions About Novels again and this newsletter seems like a reasonable outlet for some of that.

More broadly I’m just writing all of this to say that I’m going to treat this thing less like a Substack-shaped repository for a fairly niche and singularly focused writing exercise and more like an actual substack. So more regular posts, and aside from Jameson reading guides you might also occasionally get my views on like, some of the weird old sci-fi I’ve been getting into lately or whatever. I’ll do my best to index everything so you can follow along with the reading guides in the right order on your own time if that’s what you’re doing with these.

Okay, enough housekeeping, let’s talk a bit about A Singular Modernity.

Preface: Regressions of the Current Age

So in the big final chunk of Postmodernism, one of the goals for Jameson was establishing the terms for a “future confrontation” between modernism and postmodernism. This confrontation will look different as it plays out in different domains, but as I talked about in my commentary at the time, he seemed most interested in staging this a confrontation between Marxism, with its grandly modernist narrative of historical progression, and what we can kind of characterize as a poststructuralist theoretical turn away from grand narratives, and toward a kind of boutique identity-driven set of “local” concerns that is both unwilling and unable to situate itself within a broader historical context. I’m obviously being a bit unfair to both sides here but that’s the basic schematic.

He anticipates that, because one of the key characteristics of postmodernism is a denial of history, or broadly like “time”, this conflict is going to have to play out spatially, though a compelling though I think somewhat difficult to practice mode that he describes as “cognitive mapping.” What he doesn’t exactly anticipate at the time, though, is that there is another kind of stupider way in which the conflict may be staged: namely, people will just start talking about modernism again, but mean something entirely different.

That is basically the situation that Jameson finds himself contending with here in the preface to A Singular Modernity, published a couple decades after the publication of Postmodernism, and which “constitutes the theoretical section of the antepenultimate volume of The Poetics of Social Forms.” (I’m using the pagination from the verso edition published in 2012 btw). Let’s fucking GO dude.

so what’s happening here. Jameson describes it like this:

what we have here is…the reminting of the modern, its repackaging, its production in great quantities for renewed sales in the intellectual marketplace, from the biggest names in sociology to garden-variety discussions in all the social sciences (and in some of the arts as well). (7)

But why modernism? Jameson points to a couple reasons:

1. Postmodernity is too hard to think about: “Postmodernity came to seem a relatively disreputable idea in the established disciplines when some of its naster consequences—a retheorization of late capitalism, feminism, coming to terms with so-called ‘relativism’ and the constructedness of social reality—became more evident” (7). We got a bit of a taste of this in Postmodernism whenever Jameson would have a go at the ‘new social movements’ with their ‘local’ politics etc. I pointed out at the time how his treatment of these groups was fairly superficial, and even if you’re broadly sympathetic to the idea that like, theorizations of “identity” type stuff can be leveraged in cynical ways that reaffirm existing power structures, etc. etc., it’s easy enough to imagine why academic institutions as a whole would be maybe not so enthusiastic about exploring that too much.

2. the marketplace of ideas: More fundamentally, though, modernism is back because the notion of grand narrative, forward momentum, progress, etc, are all politically useful ideas, or at least more compelling than the Fukayama-style End of History type thinking that had become popular in the 90s. Turns out telling people that this is as good as it’s ever going to get is not a particularly compelling political vision. People don’t want to hear it. Interestingly, though, this new sort of generic revival of the concept of modernity seems to have been able to abstract away any sort of positive content for its grand narrative of progress. It just represents like, some intangible notion of progress as such:

it is difficult to image how one can shape an attractive political programme if you believe in the ‘end of history’ and have excluded the dimension of the future and of radical change (let alone of ‘progress’) from your political thinking… The revival of the concept of modernity is an attempt to solve that problem…What is encouraged is the illusion that the West has something no one else possesses—but which they ought to desire for themselves. That mysterious something can then be baptized ‘modernity’ and described at great length by those who are called upon to sell the product in question. (8)

On a popular level, we might see this as a kind of anticipation of like, the Obama campaign in 2008, which was just sort of generically about “Hope and Change”. The idea of forward momentum is attractive, even if what we’re moving toward is vaguely defined. But if that is what is now meant by “modernity,” then it puts what we can sort of provisionally term “older modernisms” in a weird spot. As Jameson describes,

The adversaries of the free market, such as the socialists, can only be classed in the negative or privative categories of the unmodern, the traditionalist, or even, ultimately, since they clearly resist progress and modernity, of the hardliners…What is generally meant in the polemics against socialism and Marxism (if not even against all forms of a left-centre liberalism) is that those positions are old-fashioned because they are still committed to the basic paradigm of modernism. (10)

Marxists are un-modern because they’re still committed to the basic paradigm of modernism. Conversely, the new modernity is literally postmodern, in the sense that it is preceded by these old fashion modernisms. Ah!

So we’ve already got a huge mess on our hands. Thankfully our old pal FJ is here to set things straight for us. Here’s how he sets up the project for this book:

Let’s say, to cut it short, that this will be a formal analysis of the uses of the word ‘modernity’ that explicitly rejects any presupposition that there is a correct use of the word to be discovered, conceptualized, and proposed. It is a path that will lead us on to a related concept in the aesthetic sphere, modernism, where analogous ambiguities can and will be found. But modernism in its turn will lead us on, unexpectedly, into is own immediate history and fortunes, so that this essay will conclude, not on any emergent postmodern note, as might have been expected, but rather with that specifically historical period concept I want to call late modernism. This project is therefore one of the ideological analysis, not so much of a concept, as of a word. (13)

So it’s a nice concise history of the word “modernity” plus a fun new periodization to think about. Late modernism. Sounds great. I’m all in. next time we’ll start with part 1. Thanks for reading!