SM02: Jauss The Two of Us
Jameson on HR Jauss and the Etymology of Modernity
Hello, this is the second instalment of my ongoing series summarizing Jameson’s A Singular Modernity. This instalment covers section 1 of “Part 1: The Four Maxims of Modernity.” You can read my notes on the preface for this book here.
Part 1: The Four Maxims of Modernity
1
Last time we set up the basic project for this book, which is an analysis of the word “modernity”. And so like any good etymological study we’re going to start with a little bit of historical context. Modernity: Where does it come from? Jameson traces it back to the fifth century AD, where we get two kind of different uses of modernus in Latin. It’s deployed by Pope Gelasius I basically just to designate “the present” or “now”, as in me and my contemporaries are “modern” in comparison to some earlier set of guys, and Jameson notes that for Galasius there’s “no particular privilege (save for the chronological one) for the present” (17).
The second usage, which is for our purposes more interesting, comes from Cassiodorus, a Roman scholar who was part of a Visigoth administration in the 5th century just after those guys had conquered Rome, and so his use of the term “modernus” has a bit more of an obvious political project behind it. For Cassiodorus, modernus “signifies a fundamental dividing line between the 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” (17). So “modernus” here is not only signalling that something is new, but also that it is new in a way that forces a recognition of difference with some aspect of the past. Not to jump too far ahead here but you may already get the sense that we’re creeping up on a notion of “periodization.”
But before we dig into “periodization” more explicitly, Jameson wants to talk a bit more about the “anomalous dynamics” (18) of a word like modernus, which, much like “modernity,” has this kind of double linguistic functionality built into it. So naively, following Cassiodorus, we might use it to identify a kind of break with an older period (i.e., like pre-sack rome vs. gothic rome) but already from the perspective of the present feels kind of weird to say, like, “modern gothic rome” or whatever, because obviously for us, that period is not modern at all. So there’s this kind of linguistic slipperiness to “modernity” that suggests we might want to just handle it similarly to a word like “new,” or this whole set of what linguists call “shifters”, or “those empty vehicles of ‘deixis’ or reference to the context of enunciation, whose meaning and content vary from speaker to speaker throughout time” (19).
So problem solved, right? Maybe “modernity” is just this wholly relativistic term that signals a kind of historical break between its utterer and some previous historical chapter. Of course, we know that modernity doesn’t only signify this kind of historical break in shifting relativistic terms. It also signifies a fairly precise moment of history, a “period” if you will, that was comprised of specific thinkers, informed by specific historical conditions, punctuated by specific events, and so on. And in this sense, it is not relative at all, but in fact sort of definitionally fixed.
So we’re going to need another model for understanding all of this. Jameson turns to HR Jauss, citing a book by Jauss I couldn’t find a translation of, but his essay “Modernity and Literary Tradition” in Critical Inquiry lays out the basic contours of the argument that Jameson seems to be leaning on here if you’re interested in following up on this, and I’ll cite some relevant bits of that essay below.
In any case, Jauss has this neat distinction he draws between what he calls “cyclical” and “typological” versions of the modern. Put briefly, “cyclical” modernity designates something like the shifting conception outlined above, where what counts as “modern” kind of moves around to reflect the context in which the term is used, with particular attention to the break with some previous period. As Jauss writes, “edging ever forwards, the temporal boundary of [modernity] expands to encompass a larger period of time and then leaves this period behind, transforming it into a self-contained epoch” (334). In this sense, there’s a kind of historicizing operation built right into the term, where it wants to kind of break things down into eras or periods, establish boundaries and so on.
Typological modernity, on the other hand, has more to do with identifying and articulating the character of these historical periods, primarily through comparison with other historical periods. In this sense it situates a given historical period not so much in a chronological order (where one period breaks off from another) but rather based on a typology. Here’s a nice image from Jauss:
With the typological experience of history there originates a famous image…first employed by Bernard de Chartres and later interpreted in antiquity’s favor: the [moderns] as dwarves sitting on the shoulders of giants. The trope bespeaks admiration for [antiquity], to be sure, yet in the admiration one can also hear the consciousness of a typological intensification of the old in the new: the present can see farther than the past! (336)
So this is a different kind of operation that has more to do with what we might think of as a second order awareness of history as such, and a capacity to identify common characteristics across periods, placing some discrete period of modernity “on the shoulders” of some previous “classical” era upon which it is building. To put this in like, more comfortably literary terms, what we’re beginning to approach here is the capacity to recognize allegory or metaphor, though we don’t really need to be thinking in those terms just yet.
Now, you might look at the two conceptions of modernity laid out by Jauss and say, well, these are kind of mutually exclusive. Either we’re attending to the chronological breakages between historical periods, or we’re sort of isolating out one period and finding some ancient moment for it to stand on the shoulders of.
So of course Jameson is going to say that this is actually one thing viewed two ways: “When we look at the opposition [of cyclical and typological modernity] 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” (21)
Okay! Well then how about you reformulate it for us in another, less evident way:
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. Is 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. (21)
This, to me, does not feel hugely different to the stuff I quoted from Jauss, and to be honest this wouldn’t be the first time in this newsletter where we’ve encountered Jameson essentially borrowing a nice bit of thinking from someone else only to add his own baroque “reformulation” that isn’t actually all that immediately clarifying. Not to get too far ahead of ourselves here, but you may already see in these two operations something like the tendency toward “grand narrative” that we’ve already talked about previously as a defining characteristic of Modernism. To add my own possibly non-clarifying reformulation here, we can also see in these cyclical and typological modernities a kind of analog for two great Jamesonian terms, “metonymy and metaphor,” which are going to become really important to us as we push deeper into the Poetics of Social Forms. But I can hear my kid waking up which means I should probably end here for now.
We’ll do section 2 of part 1 next week, thanks for reading!