Fredric Jameson's A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present

Abstract

The reading of Jameson's latest book calls forth at least three core questions:(i) Why modernity? Or to say it in his terms, why an ontology of the present centred on modernity? Still another version of the same query: why is the foremost critic of postmodernism revisiting the minefield of theories of the modern? Why should one care about modernity at this late hour in the cultural debate?(ii) How does he tackle modernity? By now, those of us who work within the field of cultural criticism are not only used to learning, with Jameson, of the 'whats' but also of the overdetermined nature of the 'hows'. We have learnt to ask questions like, what are the conditions of possibility for the structuring of a determined position?What is the political intervention implicit in such discursive moves?(iii) How does this new book fit or alter the new genre of theory and the Jamesonian oeuvre? Michael Denning reminds us that, rather than being one more thinker sprouting in this Age of Theory, Jameson constitutes an entire cultural field. 1 This seems to take into account not only the variety of his production -which encompasses virtually all the modes of Western Marxism, except creative writing à la Brecht -but also that 'Jameson' is something like a code word to mark a site in which relevant cultural debate on the Left takes place in our time. Whether you like him or not, he is unavoidable. He provides the conceptual apparatus and the working example of the cultural task required by the current situation. How does the book in question fit in to this project?Ideally, having posed the questions, one would proceed to answer them. That will be the task of the following remarks, which will have to bear in mind the proviso of keeping to what Jameson terms 'the logic of the situation': 2 in other words, no matter how globalised some ideologues want us to believe the world is, each intellectual is still anchored in her specific national situation. My own position at the periphery of

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“…Este conceito foi definido pelo Grupo de Investigação da Universidade de Warwick (WReC) (2015). 7 Refletindo as implicações da teoria do sistema-mundial de Immanuel Wallerstein e não indiferente ao conceito de modernidade singular cunhado por Fredric Jameson (2002), literatura-mundial é aquela que reflete um "sistema-mundial único e radicalmente desigual, uma modernidade singular, combinada e desigual", sendo uma "categoria analítica não centrada num julgamento estético" (WReC 2015, 49, tradução minha) 8 . Por isso, o hífen em NÃO MAIS MARIAS INVISÍVEIS literatura-mundial é o traço diferenciador que coloca o conceito em paralelo com a teoria de Wallerstein, assumindo-se a literatura como espelho da modernidade que comporta desigualdades simultâneas combinadas.…”

Não mais Marias invisíveis: uma leitura decolonial em “Eu empresto-te a Mariá” (2020), de Luísa Semedo, e Um Fado Atlântico (2022), de Manuella Bezerra de Melo

“…Este conceito foi definido pelo Grupo de Investigação da Universidade de Warwick (WReC) (2015). 7 Refletindo as implicações da teoria do sistema-mundial de Immanuel Wallerstein e não indiferente ao conceito de modernidade singular cunhado por Fredric Jameson (2002), literatura-mundial é aquela que reflete um "sistema-mundial único e radicalmente desigual, uma modernidade singular, combinada e desigual", sendo uma "categoria analítica não centrada num julgamento estético" (WReC 2015, 49, tradução minha) 8 . Por isso, o hífen em Original: "A single but radically uneven world-system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven […] 'World-literature', as we understand it, is an analytical category, not one centred in aesthetic judgement."…”