Common wisdomS

When in A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002) Fredric Jameson says, “[t]hus Balzac was a writer of bestsellers and Hugo very much a popular poet: something that will no longer be possible for their followers” (158), I believe he means that there is a bunch of American, Joan-Baez-style bands, experimenting with folk tradition through the tunnels of droning guitar echoes and sticky, fuzzy drums, conversing in a syncopated suspension. I also assume that he implies that within such cultural scenes there is room for the likes of Sonic Youth and the Stooges.

When in Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) G.W.F. Hegel discusses laws and the moments of their being tested, he seems to be emphasizing an interregnum between the break through of knowledge into freedom and its getting in a positive relation with “substance or the real thing” (260). The climax of his meditation about the complex, interlaced multiangulation between and among consciousness, immediacy, substance, willing, knowing, individual, unreal commandment, knowledge, ought to, and formal universality seems to be the observation about these moments having been superseded. That one and a remark about the difference about the self-consciousness and essence being perfectly transparent (261) might signal a similar philosophical marvel, as does the conclusion about acknowledging the absoluteness of the right (262).

Between Hegel’s ruminations and what Jameson would have prognosticated, a shift in cultural consciousness occurred. What used to be known as traditional cultural categories amalgamated into newly formed hybrids. Or, so common wisdom has it. The uncommon one says that humanity just united under the green flag. Or, so the nihilo-cannibalist discourse of deception has it.