an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, May 2005, ISSN 1552-5112
The Uses and Abuses of the Cultural Heritage:
Progress, Utopia and Nostalgia in Jameson's A Singular Modernity
Time
present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If
all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
T.S. Eliot
These lines present two distinct forms of
temporality. The first is one of
continuity: the future based upon both
a present and a past that it somehow contains.
The second form is one of simultaneity:
the past and future both somehow present in the present, somehow coterminous, synchronic. Simultaneity, though, presents a
problem: it forecloses the possibility
of progress. Time, in this model of
temporality—or, perhaps better, non-temporality—cannot be redeemed. Simultaneity thus requires, if one is
committed to the idea of change as Eliot is, a notion of rupture: redemption arriving in a kind of messianic
moment not contained in the unredeemed present.
And yet the more one examines these two models of
temporality, the more they seem to collapse into one another. The notion of the future’s continuity with
the past and the present, or its presence within the past, can also be seen as
a version of the synchronous. What,
then, is the relationship between the synchronic and the diachronic? The two seem, necessarily, to depend upon
each other—the notion of continuity suggesting that all three temporal orders
somehow contain aspects of each other even as the idea of rupture depends upon
something from which to break.
Fredric Jameson argues along similar lines in his
recent book A Singular Modernity. The dialectic of continuity and rupture,
Jameson argues, “cannot be arrested and ‘solved’ in and for itself, but
generates ever new forms and categories.”[1] The choice between the two is, then, “an
absolute historiographic beginning, that cannot be justified by the nature of
the historical material or evidence, since it organizes all such material and
evidence in the first place” (SM
23). The result of this realization is
what Jameson calls the “first maxim of modernity”: “We cannot not periodize,” for the critique of periodization
would posit a theory of rupture that, in turn, becomes its own form of
periodization.
This conclusion is interesting on its own, but I
raise Jameson because his book is concerned primarily with what its subtitle
calls “The Ontology of the Present,” an ontology that he connects explicitly to
the possibility of social transformation, a secular version of Eliot’s
redemption. “It is difficult to imagine
how you can shape an attractive political programme,” Jameson writes, “if you
have . . . excluded the dimension of the future and of radical change (let
alone of ‘progress’) from your political thinking” (SM 8). This is the point of
his critique of modernity, which he designates a narrative category whose
“essentially regressive” temporality creates a relentless search for origins
that excludes the dimension of the future (SM
91). And he interestingly clarifies
what he means by the future: not simply
a “Utopian space of projection and desire” but rather a place from which the
present is judged (SM 26). With this understanding of the future in
mind, then, we can begin to approach the volume’s ringing, Eliotic
conclusion: “Ontologies of the present
demand archeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past” (SM 215).
These lines are hard to understand on their own, but
what they represent, I think, is an engagement with a key question of Marxist
historiography: of what use is the
bourgeoisie cultural heritage for the construction of a future that would base
itself on radically different principles?
The Marxist tradition offers at least two competing answers: those of Lukács, on the one hand, and
Adorno, on the other. In this paper I
want to track some of the implications of the differences between these two
thinkers, reading Adorno’s work as a critique of Lukács’ to see if this history
can help us better situate Jameson’s intervention.
“It is . . .
in your own interest,” Lukács argued in his 1919 “Speech to the Young Worker’s
Congress,” “to engage in the cultural struggle, so that we can realize our own
culture and determine which of the achievements of past centuries are still
valid, which of them we can use and which of them are useless.”[2] Lukács
is speaking here from within a revolutionary moment, that of the
short-lived Hungarian communist revolution, whose failure led him to advocate
“a return to the bourgeois cultural heritage.”[3]
It in this spirit that Lukács took to his defense of
the 19th-Century historical novel against the innovations of
modernist literature. The historical
novel should, Lukács argued, present “the social and human motives which led
men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality.”[4] To this end, the historical novelist must
portray “the great transformations of history as transformations of popular
life. The effect of material and psychological changes upon people who react
immediately and violently to them, without understanding their causes . . .
‘below’ is seen as the material basis and artistic explanation for what happens
‘above’” (HN 52). And this is done, primarily, by the creation
of “characters who, in their psychology and destiny, always represent social
trends and historical forces” (HN
33).
In these quotations we find a typical Lukácsian
distinction – action is on the ground, knowledge is in the air – and this
distinction is itself attributed to modernity and, specifically, the triumph of
the bourgeoisie in 1848. For in 1848,
“the dialectical method was overthrown and with it the methodological supremacy
of the totality over the individual aspects; the parts were prevented from
finding their definition within the whole.”[5] The historical novelist seeks to repair this
gap, showing “convincingly and powerfully the irresistible course of
social-historical development” (HN
169). This development might, Lukács
admits, be “an uneven process,” but it is one that “despite all fluctuation . .
. does move forward” (HN 248).
Several concepts that are important for us to trace
are here intertwined. Lukács’ explicit
goal is to return to the moment when the bourgeoisie was still a revolutionary
class; he wishes to complete the failed revolution. Connected to this desire is a belief in progress, which 1848 may
have halted, but has not overturned.
And this progress is, further, connected both to the totalizing gaze of
the historical novelist and to a kind of nostalgic organicism that imagines a
pre-1848 moment when things were not so fragmented.
This kind of organicism is a common feature of
Lukács’ work, not only in Theory of the
Novel, but also in History and Class
Consciousness, where capitalism is described as a “mechanical
disintegration of the process of production into its components” (HCC 90) which destroys “every image of
the whole” (HCC 103) as well as
“those bonds that had bound individuals to a community in the days when
production was still ‘organic’” (HCC
90). It has been argued, by J.M.
Bernstein, among others, that “Lukács’ concept of the epic”—and by extension
his entire vision of the organic, unified, pre-capitalist world—“is a
hermeneutical construct, an act of
historical awareness from the perspective of the present by which that present
can begin to come to self-consciousness of its historical situation.”[6] Bernstein is, perhaps, thinking of the
moment in The Historical Novel when
Lukács addresses this question directly.
Asking himself “whether the past is knowable,” Lukács replies:
This question
always depends upon the extent to which the present is known, the extent to
which the contemporary situation can clearly reveal the particular trends which
have objectively led to the present, and, subjectively, it depends on how and
to what extent the social structure of the present, its level of development,
the character of its class struggles, etc., further inhibit or prevent
knowledge of past developments. (HN
200)
Now there is, obviously, some truth to Bernstein’s
claim: the view of the past depends,
fundamentally here, on the present. But
then again the present itself seems to depend on the past, and not simply on
the past as “hermeneutic construct” but rather on the “objective trends” of
those “past developments” the historical novelist was meant to reconstruct.
It is this ontology of the past—with its concomitant
interest in both progress and
nostalgia, understood from the perspective of a totalizing gaze—that is the
chief target of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic
of Enlightenment. On first reading Dialectic of Enlightenment is a puzzling
book. It seems to shuttle uneasily
between a kind of drastic re-periodization of the epoch of the bourgeoisie and
a universalizing narrative of the destructive powers of reason. So when we read that Odysseus is “the
prototype of the bourgeois individual,” we are not sure whether to re-locate
the origins of capitalism in Greece, or to understand Odysseus as the
representative of some universal human spirit.[7] This choice is, however, a false one. Not surprisingly, these two aspects of the
book are in a dialectical relationship with each other.
The authors sum up their thesis quite succinctly in
the volume’s introduction: “Myth is
already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to mythology” (DE xviii). Expanding upon this premise, they present the book’s animating
paradox, offered up as a kind of empirical observation: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest
sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings
from fear and installing them as masters.
Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity” (DE 1).
Virtually the opening gesture of the book, then, is a critique of progress,
for, as Adorno remarks in Negative
Dialectics, “no universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism,
but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”[8] What is not entirely clear at first, though,
is Dialectic of Enlightenment’s
equally strong critique of nostalgia.
The re-reading of The Odyssey
in terms of capital must be seen as a polemical move, as a response to the
idealizations of Greek culture that run the intellectual gamut; from fascism,
through Heidegger’s shepherds of Being, to Lukács organic pre-modern past. Adorno’s history is one of continuity, then,
but a continuity not of progress, but of catastrophe, a continuity, we might
say, of the ever-same. What is
important to notice, here, is that there is no ontological claim being made
about Odysseus or about Greek society.
Rather, we have here a polemical use of the past that refrains from
making “objective” claims about that past, not through an ahistorical belief
that all history is text, but rather through an absolute emphasis on the
historicity of thought itself. Our
apprehension of the past is necessarily conditioned by the historical situation
of our present and this fact must be
reproduced in our analysis of the past.
The cultural heritage, then, is not the repository of values to be
sifted through and preserved—and where then would one find value in the
movement from slingshot to atom bomb?—but in the present space of contestation;
that of our present-day quarrels.
Writing about commodity fetishism, Adorno argues that
“the true ‘mediation’ between society and psychology” is to be found “in the
commodity and fetish character itself.”[9] And this fetish character is not “a fact of
consciousness,” but rather “dialectical in character, in the eminent sense that
it produces consciousness.”[10] Our consciousness, then, is an absolute
product of the social situation in which we exist. Truth, for Adorno, emerges from a confrontation between this
situated consciousness and its equally situated object, also articulated by
Walter Benjamin: “The truth is not a
merely contingent function of knowing, but is bound to a nucleus of time lying
hidden within the knower and the known alike.”[11] Truth is not present in the cultural
heritage, to be discovered by a free-floating intellectual gaze. Rather, the truth of the past is constituted by the confrontation between
the observing subject and the past this subject attempts to understand. The past is not, for Adorno, objective; but
this fact does not make it inaccessible.
Progress too is not “ontologically refused us.”[12] Rather, it remains the utopian horizon of
Adorno’s thought, but one that cannot be contaminated by contact with the
unfreedom of what exists. “History,”
Adorno argues, “promises no salvation,” for once progress is imagined as a
concrete historical fact, rather than a concept by which one judges the world
as it is, freedom has been betrayed.[13] We can see this negative vision of utopia
operative in Adorno’s view of the work of art.
In direct contrast to Lukács’ objective social forces, Adorno argues
that art’s spirit “is concerned with what has not yet been socially approved
and preformed.”[14] Art thus exists as the “determinate
negation” of the social world (AT
93), or what Adorno calls the “negative appearance of utopia” (AT 130), by which he means that in its
negation of what exists, art preserves the utopian longings exiled from the
world of unfreedom.
We find ourselves, here, at a kind of aporia. Either we adhere to the notion of progress
as continuity, as in Lukács, and face the possibility that our Utopian hopes
will become compromises with the social order that is. Or we have a vision of the future that in
its absolute unspecifiability leaves us with no way to attempt to bring it into
being. For how can one act to create a
world that is without any concrete content?
How can one act in a present that must, somehow, refuse to use its own
heritage in the quest for a better future?
It is in this context that I’d like to return to
Jameson’s closing line: “Ontologies of
the present demand archeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past” (SM 215). Within A Singular Modernity,
“forecasts of the past” refer to the narrative trope of modernity itself, the
attempt to locate a moment in the past as the “origin” of a process that then
continues ad infinitum. In the terms of my argument, this is the
Lukácsian option of a continuity with the past’s achievements, which Jameson
here rejects. What, though, is an
“archeology of the future?” The first
thing we can note is that Jameson is here, explicitly, using a Foucauldian
term, one which paradoxically signifies both historical rupture, as against
continuity, and the specificity of historical periods, the consistency of their
own internal discourse and the incompatibility of the discourse of one
“epistemic regime” with that of another.
But Jameson’s Foucault is a radically re-functionalized thinker, and key
sections of A Singular Modernity
develop impressive dialectical re-readings of both de Man and Foucault that are
in significant excess of their expressed intentions (of course, the author is
dead).
Jameson is operating within what I have already
suggested is the Adornian use of the past.
Situated and polemical, Jameson uses Foucault and de Man in his argument
against the concept of modernity, and what is of value in both thinkers is the
notion of rupture. But this is a
rupture that would, in a kind of willful act of periodization, separate the
present from both the past and the
future. Rejecting “forecasts of the
past” means rejecting not only Lukácsian continuity, but that of Adorno as
well, for whom all of human history is the story of destruction. Jameson’s aim, I think, is to restore the
dimension of the future to our analysis—to interrupt the open-ended temporality
of modernity and to confront it with something that is other, to open up a
space from which to judge the present.
And yet he wants to do this by investigating the content of that future
– that is to say, against Adorno, he wants a future that is concrete. But
unlike Lukács, it seems, Jameson wishes to find the seeds of this future not in
the ontology of the past, but in the ontology of the present. Here,
though, we have stumbled upon a conceptual problem. For how can we look
for a future that is conceived, through the notion of rupture, to be absolutely
distinct from the present? There is, finally, another aporia here:
that between theory and practice. Bringing an absent future into being
requires a leap of faith, a movement into territory where theory, perhaps, can
offer little guidance. The risk of compromise is no doubt great, but it
might just be a risk that any determined action against the never-ending world
of capitalist modernity requires. To put the issue another way: the
notion of totality cannot be used to negate contradiction. Modernity may
present itself ideologically as a smooth, orderly progression, but it
nevertheless contains contradictions, whose relationship to the totality
is not simply one of containment. For these contradictions are what,
ultimately, could push the present toward its own rupture. But this will not
happen by itself; as Nietzsche once argued, “that which is falling must also be
pushed.”
Jameson’s utopian hope, then, is to salvage the
future from the never-ending present, to push past the ideological veil of
modernity and discover its limiting contradictions. And yet his account
of the social world, what the title refers to as a “singular modernity,” seems
to leave little room for such contradictions to exist. It is as if the
absence of Utopia in the never-ending world of modernity has forced it to go
underground. Absent from the world, it seeks refuge in the critic’s mind.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern
cultural sound, text and image
Volume 2,
May 2005, ISSN 1552-5112
notes