‘Modernity’, by which I mean the word, has had an exceptionally good run for its money, but is now long past its sell-by date (the term has been used to peddle so many meretricious panaceas of late that the commercial metaphor for once seems apt). According to Fredric Jameson, the ‘project’—another label subject to intolerable abuse—is over.footnote¹ It may, on more dignified Habermasian assumptions, be incomplete; but its incompleteness is merely a token that whatever promise it once bore is now definitively buried. It has become a modern form of ‘antiquity’. footnote²

Yet something strange—singular—is going on. It is a notable feature of the burial that, in public discourse, there have been many recent attempts to resurrect the corpse, above all in the Third Way’s ‘modernizing’ of political parties, social services, labour markets and, lately, just war.footnote³ This is doubtless the sort of thing that Jameson has in mind when he speaks of a ‘reminting’ of the ‘modern’ that takes the form of ‘intellectual regressions’. Jameson cites the corresponding example of Schroeder’s Germany and Oskar Lafontaine’s lament:

The words ‘modernization’ and ‘modernity’ have been degraded to fashionable concepts under which you can think anything at all. If you try to figure out what the people called ‘modernizers’ today understand under the term ‘modernity’, you find that it is little else than economic and social adaptation to the supposed constraints of the global market.footnote⁴

The term thus becomes code for closing down alternatives to capitalism, a massive irony in that many of the links between modernity, modernization and modernism are often held to be unintelligible without reference to the utopian and revolutionary moments of socialism and communism.footnote⁵ Modernity’s epitaph might well be the long goodbye to the hopes invested in that particular constellation, overwhelmed by the final triumph of the alignment of the Enlightenment project with the imperatives of a market society, the name for whose contemporary ubiquitousness is now the consumerist blankness of the postmodern. In the mouths of today’s politicians, the ‘modern’ is but the spectral trace of the fake re-enchantment of a thoroughly disenchanted world.

This ‘abuse’—Jameson’s word—of terms presumes, if not correct, then at least plausible uses, from which it deviates. The task to hand therefore calls for numerous theoretical and historical discriminations; and is complicated by the fact that the abusive invocations are not merely random or opportunistic. There is something in the appropriations themselves that tells how the processes they ideologically represent and foreclose were, if not destined, then likely to end up precisely here. Jameson is a past master in showing how apparently bankrupt terms nevertheless disclose something of the reality they cover with the blandishments of the ideological caress—most influentially in his reflections on how the vulgar uses of the term ‘postmodernity’ reflect the vulgarization of the contemporary life world. The same holds for the degraded afterlife of the term ‘modernity’. From one point of view, it is empty, drained of all substantial meaning, but from another—symptomatic—point of view, it is full, directing the mind, when not drugged by the incantatory repetition of the empty signifier, to a bitter reckoning with where we are now. How then to sort the wheat from the chaff, especially when in certain cases the chaff itself turns out to be, in however thin or poisonous a guise, a form of wheat?

Jameson’s undertaking is thus first and foremost an inquiry into the fortunes of a word: ‘Let’s say, to cut it short, that this will be a formal analysis of the uses of the word ‘modernity’ that explicitly rejects any presupposition that there is a correct use of the word to be discovered, conceptualized and proposed’. This is reminiscent of Raymond Williams’s attempt—in Keywords; which also has an entry for ‘modern’—to track social and cultural histories by way of historicized semantics. It is an approach vulnerable to methodological critique—as, for example, in Quentin Skinner’s reservations about Williams’s method, in particular his claim that the book’s restriction of its brief to a field of historical meanings elided the crucial distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘reference’.footnote⁶ This is, if in a somewhat different fashion, also a problem for Jameson. If meanings, especially ideologically congealed ones, obscure reality, we nevertheless have to deploy them as a bridgehead to provide some relation of reference to actual states of affairs—the latter identified, broadly, with capitalism: ‘the only satisfactory semantic meaning of modernity lies in its association with capitalism’. Jameson compares this to looking through a ‘pane of glass’; but whereas the metaphor normally signifies a principle of uncomplicated transparency (as in Sartre and Orwell), here it is the site of a frustration:

What is constitutively frustrating about such an analysis is that, like the pane of glass at which you try to gaze even as you are looking through it, you must simultaneously affirm the existence of the object while denying the relevance of the term that designates that existence.