Jameson A Singular Modernity.pdf

FREDRIC JAMESON

A SINGULAR MODERNITY

ESSAY ON THE ONTOLOGY OF THE PRESENT

A Singular Modernity

A Singular Modernity

Essay on the Ontology

of the Present

FREDRIC JAMESON

VERSO

London • New York

The present book constitutes the theoretical section of the antepenultimate volume

of The Poetics of Social Forms. It originated in a series of lectures prepared for the

Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Wissenschaftszentrum of Nor-

thrhine-Westphalia at the invitation of its director, Dr. Joern Ruesen, for which I

herewith express my thanks.

Contents

For Wayne Booth

Preface: Regressions of the Current Age

Part I The Four Maxims of Modernity

Transitional Modes

First published by Verso 2002

Part II Modernism as Ideology

139

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Conclusion: 'II faut etre absolument moderne!'

211

13579 10 8642

Notes

217

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG

USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606

www.versobooks.com

Index

241

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN 1-85984-674-2

ISBN 1-85984-450-2 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in 10'/2/13pt Sabon by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex

Printed and bound in Greal Britain by

Cromwell Press Ltd., Trowbridge, Wiltshire

www.cromwellpress.co.uk

PREFACE

Regressions of the Current Age

In full postmodernity, and until very recently, there had

always seemed to be a certain general agreement, a certain

unspoken consensus, on those features of the modern that

were no longer desirable. The asceticism of the modern, for

example, or its phallocentrism (whether it was ever

altogether logocentric I am a little less sure); the authoritari-

anism and even the occasional repressiveness of the modern;

the teleology of the modernist aesthetic as it proceeded on

triumphalistically from the newer to the newest; the mini-

malism of much that was modernist as well; the cult of the

genius or seer; the non-pleasurable demands made on the

audience or public - all these things, which are of course

interrelated and often simply aspects or different versions of

each other, have systematically and repeatedly been named

by the commentators.

Yet in the midst of all these healthy movements of disgust

and revulsion, indeed, to the very sound of windows break-

ing and old furniture being thrown out, we have begun in

the last few years to witness phenomena of a very different

order, phenomena that suggest the return to and the re-

establishment of all kinds of old things, rather than their

wholesale liquidation. Thus one of the great achievements of

postmodernity - of 'theory' or theoretical discourse on the

one hand, of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

on the other (along with Bourdieu's critique of the disci-

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