A Singular Modernity by Fredric Jameson

Author:Fredric Jameson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

4

The preceding account seems to have left us with the feeling that modernism is an immense negative process, a kind of fuite en avant, like Benjamin’s angel blown backwards by the storm wind: and that the storm wind, which he identified with history, or in other words with capitalism, is to be imagined as increasing in intensity from year to year and period to period. This transfer of the temporality of capitalism – with its ever-more-rapid style and fashion changes, and the boom-and-bust cycle of some desperate movement from markets saturated with commodities to new markets and new commodities alike – to the dynamics of artistic modernism is plausible in its analogies, but fairly empty and unspecific as to its content. It tends to confirm Hugo Friedrich’s complaint, in the work on poetic modernism already referred to, that only ‘negative categories’ seem available for describing modernism.46 It is a complaint he documents by way of a list of standard traits rehearsed in various national traditions in efforts to circumscribe the slippery phenomenon in question:

Disorientation, disintegration of the familiar, loss of order, incoherence, fragmentism [sic!], reversibility, additive style, depoeticized poetry, bolts of annihilation, strident imagery, brutal abruptness, dislocation, astigmatism, alienation.47

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