Is Modernism timely now? Does periodization, which assigns to all the modernisms of the early twentieth century their entrances and exits on the stage of literary history, and leaves them, in a later act, merely to putter in the background—there to serve, like Prufrock’s “attendant lord,” to “swell a progress, start a scene or two, / Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool” in the hands of some postmodern Hamlet—undercut their timeliness? Neil Levi argues that Fredric Jameson’s periodization of Modernism (that is, of its own, ironic periodization of itself, as an age committed to subjectivity, irony, and style, from the perspective of a late modernism) leads to just this disenchanting possibility for Modernist scholars.1 And perhaps Jameson would wryly affirm our resulting boredom as a symptom of the deflation of Modernist escapism, of our desire to “make it new” in a specialist idiolect. Yet to muddy the issue, there is Levi’s further suggestion that Jameson, notwithstanding, actually cherishes varieties of modernism; that he regularly draws upon modernist names and texts in the articulation of his utopian project. Levi reads this inconsistency as a symptom of the periodization dilemma that Jameson himself strikingly identifies in his historicist approach to Modernism, and whose contradictions Jameson allows necessarily to persist in his own work.
I will not here follow the path opened up for Levi by this dilemma, which is an invitation to supplement Modernist periodization with notions of a persistence and authenticity of modernist “events” beyond period breaks. It may be worth noting Jameson’s own answer to the dilemma in his first major study of Modernism, posed in the fiery language of Wyndham Lewis: canonical modernists are but paper radicals, puppets of a capitalist empire they cannot escape except in sublime or tortured extrusions of new forms of personal language and style, new expressive figures that become the ascetic, verbally imprisoned, yet consubstantial phantoms of a liberal culture only too easily tethered to the justification of violence and oppression; and yet, to the extent modernists know this, and can like Lewis boundlessly (dialectically) self-satirize, they may teach us a still timely truth—if an ugly one, yet unresolved—of our own intellectual and artistic institutions in the world at large.2 This dialectical truth, and the ambivalent politics of its expression and reception—one utopian wingtip lifted to the beyond, the other pinioned in the mire—also reflects a more enduring pattern. Jameson treats all texts before, during, and after Modernism as dialectical structures in which utopian and repressive forces inhere. One might productively wonder why modernisms attract his faintest enthusiasm, and so make a rhetorical rather than logical question of their utopian timeliness as opposed to regressive lure.
I would like to focus on something rather different from the politics of the “subjective” in which this dilemma of timeliness and modernism is enmeshed, and turn the problem around to another of its sides: narrative. Throughout Jameson’s work, which has charted the “political unconscious” of literary history from the age of chivalric romances (and earlier, if we count his sketches of archaic oral literature) to a postmodern present, past writers are folded into a grand narrative, a self-conscious, Marxian romance of market growth, state transformation, geopolitics, and class struggle. Narrative has always been Jameson’s key formal concept for the mediation of past writing and the situations of the present-day Left. History as structural narrative, not local content, allows us to grasp the timeliness of symbolic acts. If this narrative is characterized by periods and period breaks, as Jameson says it must be, then the consequence for timeliness is that past writers are timely insofar as they illuminate, not first and foremost their own colorful episode, but as necessary joints and segments, the total story relevant to us today. We have heard something like this before:
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order … No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone … You must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
(Eliot 1976:49)
For Eliot, writing these words in 1920, this simultaneous order was “timeless” and metaphysical; one found one’s complete meaning in the phantom identity of a textual men’s club. For Jameson, it is narrative and material. Dead labors and struggles still live in our bones, feeding the life of writing.
I propose this comparison, distasteful in most respects, because I believe it is symptomatic of their otherwise diverse commitments to the modern that both Eliot and Jameson seek to place the timely writer in a relation to a past tradition that is not evidently given, and struggle to understand the estranging pastness or presentness of this past. Both, in so doing, have found themselves waging war on the inward turn of the modern writer (or scholar) and insisted on the ineluctable burden of (either pre-modernist or modernist) inheritance, as well as on an unattractive labor of impersonality or depersonalization required for its recognition.3 Yet if we draw back from Eliot’s own platitudes about inheritance itself (as if it meant little more than a borrower’s card to a Borgesian library of the universal human imagination), we may consider the economic legacy of inheritance and its cognate, heritage, for all its curious relation to the very narrative of capitalist modernity here at issue. Inheritances are largely controlled by modern private property law, but the exchanges thus regulated are not commodity transactions but gift transactions, and inheritance remains one of the most durable vestiges of kinship-based pre-capitalist societies—emanating from a shrunken domestic sphere—in modern times. Cultural heritage similarly refers to intellectual property—of imaginative, ethical, and/or informational kind—as well as that material property in which it is mnemonically embedded (whether Tsimshian ceremonial poles, Irish Ascendancy big houses, European patriarchal surnames, or books), that are passed inter-generationally within social groups via transactions of stories, manners, cherished objects, and other social objects that constitute collective identities and ethical horizons for those indebted to their givers. While it is of course possible to speak alternatively of a commodified heritage, the latter can only refer to a secondary or parasitic appendix to a non-market process of interpellative gifting, since such a “heritage,” without prior imaginary identification as such, and fueled only by alienated purchasing mechanisms, would always feel fundamentally elective, that is alienable, rather than necessary or obligatory. This is an important distinction, since one of the most daring and unsettling projects undertaken by modernists was the claim of a heritage or heritages in conflict with that of liberal imperialism—heritages not their own, but discovered especially in the new portraits of tribal life (ancient and contemporary) of a new anthropology and classicism. Yeats’ free appropriations from Celtic, East Indian, and other lore, like Joyce’s unexpected forging of a conscience for his “race” from a cosmopolitan, but just as insistently Dublinian, plethora of myths and histories, or H. D.’s syncretic and dialectical vision of American Christian and pagan religions, all act on Pound’s forthright assertion in Canto 81: “What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.” What distinguishes such projects from a surrounding, cruder array of cultural appropriations and primitivisms is a modernist understanding that such love is not merely elective or affective, but embedded in a long, violent multicultural history from which the writer cannot detach him or herself, and which he or she typically expresses as a euphoric, spiritual, tragic, or absurd fate.
It is in this context that Levi’s passing observation, that in its progressivism, its commitment to “make it new,” Jameson’s “own thinking reveals a kind of modernist” tendency, may here be revisited. Though rare enough, it is a stunning capacity of Jameson’s prose, when speaking of the most uncompromised utopian visions, to drift into a kind of gorgeous, earthly mysticism, to evoke never-before-seen colors, new bodily senses and organs, or undreamt-of types of personhood—not as literal ground-plans for the future, of course, but as metaphorical tokens for us in the present to redeem, if they are to have value, in a progressive engagement beyond writing. However metaphorical, it is easy to see that such moments belong to the same futurist cloth in which are denounced, in darker hues, regressions to recognizably past social forms, and past or residual modes of production, as so much errant utopianism. Yet if Jameson seeks to “make it new” as such, I doubt that this allies him with Modernism, which must be understood for its backward turn as much as for its inward turn, as the origin of Pound’s rule in a pre-capitalist (nearly two-millennia-old) Chinese washbasin inscription already implies. It would seem more evident that Jameson’s progressivist narrative—in which pre-capitalist modes and heritages normally appear as things of the past, and play no vital role in a (however uneven or conflicted) present grasped as an “archeology of the future”—has its genealogy in the longer modernity of Marxism and its Enlightenment heritage, rather than in Modernism itself.
The axiom to be introduced here, then, is that Modernism is not only a period, but also a heritage, one with its own material history and political unconscious. Modernism remains timely, not only because one might be able to trace the persistence of Modern events and crises into the material battlefield, the historicity of the present, but also because its very utopian fabric, for the first time in history, comes into ideological being under the pressure of a narrative totality. It emerges, that is, from the unraveling of an evidently inadequate, yet imaginatively necessary and ruthlessly useful, totalizing humanist narrative supplied by the imperialist realization of capitalist modernity, along with the agonized, innovative remaking of this story when brought into myriad dialectical contact with its repressed antitheses, with the otherness of real and vital, coeval social formations having different modes of production, and of segments within capitalist societies where such modes endure. It is true that such segments may suffer a paralyzing containment, in which social power is flattened into compensatory, aesthetic gesture, but this containment may be permeable, its walls flammable, so that identity-based terrorism or revolution, not always liberal, may erupt. Yeats was right to worry, as he stepped into the fin-de-siècle, whether his neo-Celtic dreams of heroic exchanges, politicized eros, and non-market production (from Aran to Emain Macha) were little more than irrelevant, vague ornaments of a bourgeois outcaste. Yet he was also right to worry, as the century went on, that such dreams might play a part in social history, justifying the human sacrifices, the gifts of life as well as the takings, to which a still blood-ridden Ireland’s independence was partly due.4 Today, human sacrifice, heroic kinship, and non-market labor, mediated by languages of heritage, remain fused in segments and strata across the capitalist world, and it is surely timely to rethink them as modern, as material inheritance rather than mere ideological fantasy, and appropriate them to authentically utopian ends. Better this than dismiss their gregarious nostalgia, or overlook their terrifying violence, which meet capital on its own regressive terms.
In his Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson tells us how utopian writing may be usefully rather than mistakenly understood as political, in the interests of a contemporary Left politics. His starting point is the problem of “situatedness”—the terrible limitations, indeed, prejudices and blindnesses—that any utopian text must have, growing as it must out of a particular social formation, geography, and history (Jameson 2005:170). To historicize the utopian is seemingly to muck it in its pasts and presents, and sever it from the radical leap to a future it insists upon imagining. The mistaken way to understand its radical politics is to cobble together the various positive themes and ideas, the bits and pieces of utopian floorplans, from a variety of utopian texts that are thus unfortunately but inevitably “situated” in ideological prejudices and local or historical blindnesses, with the idea that all could sit comfortably together in a kind of disinterested or relativistic unity. He is scathing on the subject of different cultures or social groups in the world “communicating” (Jameson 2005:221) together in order to produce a utopia he terms reflexive (Jameson 2005:213)—yielding the image of a universal (but not homogeneous) culture always locally negotiating, translating, and adapting itself to the internal differences cast up in symbolic form by, or “thematized” (Jameson 2005:180) by, a globalized world (Jameson 2005:215–16). This is mere aesthetic resolution at best, and Disneyfication at worst, of a political reality that remains unresolved and unjust at an economic level. Liberal multiculturalism and pluralism are his explicit targets here, but these have cousins on the Left, and in the latter context infect a utopian literary criticism that is satisfied to excavate and celebrate the distinctly progressive content in art according to broadly Left social values. This kind of utopian reading—a net in which, I suppose, many of us may be caught—implicitly
presuppose[s] that there is ultimately somewhere a correct view of Utopia which is to be attained by allowing for the author’s partiality or even by triangulating a variety of different Utopias in order to determine their common emplacement. But there is no such correct Utopia; and all the familiar ones we have are irredeemably class-based.
(Jameson 2005:171)
Presumably this is because “correct” Utopia for the Marxian historian will be some kind of laborious product of, rather than fantastic alternative to, such worldly conditions. It is an unfortunate paradox, Jameson concludes, that utopian writers must be committed to the “professional effacement, in advance and by definition, of all these concrete determinants [of race and class, of language and childhood, of gender and situation-specific knowledge] of a properly Utopian ideology,” because “it is an effacement which is a repression rather than a working through” (Jameson 2005:171).
But working through does not have its end point in anything like affirmation of such situated knowledges. Two important propositions, for readers of modernism, are connected with Jameson’s portrait of a mistaken view of the politics of the utopian text. The first is that a genuine, which is to say a currently progressive, radical politics should understand utopian writing principally for its negative representation, for its structure of critique or form, rather than its content. He deploys a Greimasian square to diagram a vanguard political interpretation that would cast a cold eye on the positive utopian content synthesized from different utopian visions (the “complex” solution generated by resolving an ideological quarrel or contrast, utopian this vs utopian that), and would seize instead on the implied but unrepresented perspective whereby we might resolve contrasting utopian critiques (the “neutral” solution, resolving an opposition of dystopian anti-this vs. dystopian anti-that) (Jameson 2005:181). He asks us to imagine a utopian perspective—an imaginary “situation,” if you like—from which we could launch, that is ourselves escape, both utopian critiques; and this perspective by definition always remains formal, without symbolization. Hence this first proposition challenges us to reread what is utopian in modernisms, and to be strictly suspicious of all utopian content, rather than to celebrate it at the cost of its always situated and compromised material history, and to pursue instead a chiaroscuro dialectics of negative representation uniquely opened up therein. This is not likely to sit well with those of us who would like to hold onto some of that content, even when situated (though the problem of how to do so without being anachronistic is one forced terribly upon us). Jameson will suggest that only such a “non-communicating” world vision allows the real problem of economic, as opposed to merely cultural, justice to be solved (Jameson 2005:221).
The second proposition, however, is that the mistaken, “complex” ideology, this mistaken or “bad Utopianism, founded on the illusions of representation and of affirmative content” (Jameson 2005:179), is distinctively Modernist. For it affirms contraries, brackets commitments from perspectives understood relativistically, and hence imposes Modernist “irony” and aesthetic “reflexivity” in order to imagine a cultural solution carefully displacing itself from, even while acknowledging or lamenting, real material conflicts (178–9). Put crudely, Modernism enables the bad, “complex” or syncretic method, and Postmodernism the good, “neutral” or negative method, of understanding utopian ideology and the way forward for the Left today.
A ready response to Jameson’s strategic periodization is to propose that while Modernism as a panoply movement may well be strongly characterized by this kind of irony and reflexivity (aesthetic and political), it is no less plausible to show how agonized it is by the “neutral” strategies of double negativity Jameson denies to it. Some canonical works, like The Waste Land, are surely as easy, if not easier, to see as structures of multiple negation implying some unresolved perspective (one actually figured there by an utterly chameleonic Tiresias, and in Eliot’s further pursuit of a totalizing and totally estranged voice, one that half vanishes into the mystical, transcendental addressee of his later poetry, its other half left to the plodding, inconsistent discourse of a “Christian society” in prose), than as structures of multiple content ironically affirmed. Or, leaving the text in-itself aside, it is just as plausible from a reception-based perspective to see such works as teaching machines for the former political aesthetic as for the latter. The same could be said about novels like Nostromo or Tarr. Consequently we might well find it defensible to dissolve period distinctions enough to preserve Jameson’s larger historico-political theory, in the hypothesis that Modernism already mobilizes the whole contradictory and contrary structure of complex/ neutral managing of Utopian expression, and that some writers drift decidedly toward the neutral, while others—ironically, those closest to the Left (for example, I believe, Woolf and Joyce)—lean toward the complex “resolutions” of a political unconscious that Jameson stages rather as respectively Modernist and Postmodernist acts in the drama of modern cultural history.
Such a response would merely open up—indeed, why deny it, would redeem—Modernism for the kind of political criticism and timely engagement that Jameson assigns to the properly utopian. But there is another and more (I hope) interestingly dialectical objection to be ushered forward: why not affirm situated utopian content? Must it always be class-based? If not class-based, must such content belong anachronistically to the past? Could the unevenness of uneven development be a motor rather than a drag upon change? No doubt the present world is a different place from the one the modernists inhabited, yet just as surely the continuities between the two are many and foundational for the lived experience of, and the systemic limits that impinge upon, most people today. We need not make such a sociological or historical argument to make the logical one, however: why cannot a post-class-based utopia be imagined from a collage or synthesis of positive utopian content, or more simply, from looking at what is valuable in the present and the past, in the many, different, presents and pasts? Such a utopian synthesis, Jameson warns us, is an untimely, regressive “chimera”:
If true, this principle [the great empiricist maxim, nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses] spells the end, not only of Utopia as a form, but of Science Fiction in general, affirming as it does that even our wildest imaginings are all collages of experience, constructs made up of bits and pieces of the here and now: “When Homer formed the idea of Chimera, he only joined into one animal, parts which belonged to different animals; the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent.” On the social level, this means that our imaginations are hostages to our own mode of production (and perhaps to whatever remnants of past ones it has preserved). It suggests that at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment.
(Jameson 2005: xiii)
But this view seems to me somewhat pessimistic, first, about empirical science, which can be considered to produce its new knowledge and new objects or beings, for better or worse, precisely through the incremental combination of existing knowledges (insofar as all new knowledge and experience is created by, or calculated by, inherited and existing bits and pieces physical or mathematical). Science viewed thus, as a creative collage of “bits and pieces of the here and now,” is after all clearly realized in the many new gene-spliced creations of today, but significantly, is already foreseen by Wells’ vanguard vivisectionist, the modernist Dr Moreau. Second, “on the social level,” it is a risky gambit for the purposes of argument to assimilate all social work and generation to a single mode of production. Think of areas of gift or other kinds of exchange, of non-market zones of semi-autonomous activity—as small and trans-local as the nuclear family, or as large and more situated as the social institutions created by contemporary American and Canadian Native peoples that build on a continuous history of non-market modes of production and social life (in Canada, there is an entire Northern province or “territory” with a semi-autonomous Native government)—that take part in the complicated web of ideologies, non-government organizations and institutions, and ruling bodies that affect how diverse modern people value, think, and act on their wealth and desires, ruthless or utopian. The latter reference to contemporary aboriginal sovereignty politics reminds us, indeed, that Jameson’s apparently dismissive assessment of the “remnants” of past social forms effectively excludes such institutions from his critical analysis of “new social movements,” and infelicitously echoes a primitivist view of aboriginal people (and by extension, all pre-capitalist heritages) as frozen in a dead past, not forces in the Modern. I do not mean that these aboriginal examples, or any other non-market heritages, are inevitably in harmony with the aims of the Left, or innocent of oppressive social relations, but only that they have demonstrable social power and continuity in modern history, and can offer compelling, actually existing models of a still undecided struggle against capitalism for outsiders to them.
In short, we can certainly look further back, to the situated pasts of various modernities, to find utopian elements drawn from pre- or anti- (e.g. in the case of aboriginal peoples) or non- (e.g. in the case of certain domestic spheres and women’s institutions) capitalist heritages, all recombined or newly activated in Modernism. And Jameson’s important work on Modernism and Fascism will already have suggested the dialectical care that must be brought to evaluating the mixture of modes of production thus mobilized. Beyond this, it may be in Modernism as such, for reasons I have suggested above, that we may find a vast array of programmatic attempts to leap over or shatter unified images of the present with a motley army of re-animated ruins and specters of pasts and presents lured from the shadows of capitalist production. Chimeras, new beings generated from the intercourse of such beings, within or without the marketplace, may be exactly what we need.5
To take the notion of uneven development in its most radical sense is to unfold a latent dimension in Jameson’s general observation,
that it is still difficult to see how future Utopias could ever be imagined in any absolute dissociation from socialism in its larger sense of anti-capitalism; dissociated, that is to say, from the values of social and economic equality and the universal right to food, lodging, medicine, education and work.
(Jameson 2005:196–7)
Present social groups are still able to recall and to a greater or lesser sense reproduce, from their own heritages (as present pasts), semi-autonomous realms that are immeasurably closer to this definition of “socialism in its larger sense” than is the liberal culture of imperialist heritage in its global villager/policeman guise. The political obstacle to “socialism in its larger sense” is perhaps not one of reflexive triangulation at all—of “communication”—but of semi-autonomous material resources pitted against the forces of imperialist assimilation inevitable to capitalist development. When Jameson sketches his view of a contemporary, utopian “archipelago,” he explains with rare optimism that imperialist expansion would no longer be a threat because there is nothing left to conquer (whereas, one might well worry, that even or especially in a system of “non-communicating” societies, there is always an other with valuable resources: why not just take them?). Imperialism, as a state form of increasing wealth through aggressive territorial expansion, is intrinsic to market capitalism—but also older than capitalism, from whose pre-history it draws its us–them, human–animal, clean– unclean ideologies of sexual, ethnic, or racial distinction. It is hard to see a materialist utopia working without producing and reproducing an array of “communicative” ideologies that imagine transcending such durable dispositions. In any case, there are surely both capitalist and non-capitalist utopian chimeras, both modern and postmodern. And I have wanted to suggest that it is still worth reading across the modernisms for those utopian laboratories hidden in its cellars and closets, busy giving birth to chimeras in which life under capitalism has been productively mated with (not replaced by) devalued, degraded, and obsolete realizations of other modes of life.
If Jameson is right about Modernism, then I am tempted to see Theory itself in the long shadows cast by its twilight. If Theory is the specialized, scholarly, dialectical push and free-fall into boring, repressed, and otherwise unassimilated historical givens, which keep a door open in today’s literature classroom, in its very utopian historicity, then as such it may be seen as an inheritor of the Modernist fight for ongoing, mundane epiphanies wrought by heretofore degraded ready-mades, overlooked passions, rejected tastes, and anachronized devotions, an inheritor that will affirm all their relative negations as the formal perspective, the utopian poursoi or reflective subjectivity, of a now unrepresentable but unavoidable planetary totality.
1 I will use forms of the term “Modernism” to suggest substantive period and disciplinary concepts, and forms of the term “modernism” to suggest the range of possibly incommensurate forms of modern writing of the chronological period whose widest scope would range from 1890 to 1960, and whose canonical range would restrict itself to the decades bracketed by the South African and Second World Wars.
2 See the conclusion to Jameson (1979:176–7).
3 It is tempting, indeed, to see Jameson’s deflating assessment of late and early modernists, the immediately preceding generations for writers of the 1960s, as comparable to Eliot’s of his preceding Victorians and Romantics. To either side of these respective generations, the one finds stronger fuel in either an earlier Balzac or contemporary LeGuin, the other in an earlier Dante or contemporary Joyce, to ignite their utopian blasts. One might also historicize the modernist heritage for the 1960s in alternative ways: Joan Didion, a canonical 1960s commentator and Jameson’s contemporary, expresses in exemplary fashion the paralyzing ironies Jameson finds in the ideology of late modernism:
I suppose I am talking about … the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise.
(Didion 1979:206)
Compare this with an evocation of modernist heritage of the same period by Susan Stanford Friedman, one decade-generation younger:
“What was modernism” to a graduate student in English and American literature in the heady days of the 1960s? Modernism was rebellion. Modernism was “make it new.” Modernism was resistance, rupture. To its progenitors. To its students. Modernism was the antidote to the poison of tradition, obligation
(Stanford Friedman 2001:493)
4 Like most gift-centered economies, the older worlds celebrated by the Celtic Revival were not egalitarian but hierarchical. They were not, however, exploitative by Marxist definition, so that their utopian expression has to be judged in relation both to capitalist society and to those still thriving inheritances from older modes, such as patriarchy and clan/kin superiority.
5 I insist here on the durability of the marketplace because I take the evils of capitalism to derive from a transcending, reified culture of the market in capitalist imperialism, not from the commodity economy itself which is present in many non-exploitative societies where varieties of gift economy, rather, are reified as a primary order and horizon of values. It is worth noting, too, that the figure of the chimera can be sought in the property objects of such economies, perhaps even more starkly than in subject types. Douglas Mao’s study (1998) is an exercise in this kind of historical anthropology, trying to get inside those real and imagined objects produced in, by, or for modernist tastes which harbor shadows and forces resistant to capitalist assimilation.
Didion, J. (1979) The White Album, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Eliot, T. S. (1976) The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London: Methuen.
Friedman, S. (2001) “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/ Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8(3): 493–513.
Jameson, F. (1979) Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
——(2005) Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, New York: Verso.
Mao, D. (1998) Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production, Princeton: Princeton University Press.