c. venne; m. featherstone - modernity.pdf - Nauki społeczne - MKTK

Theory, Culture &

Society

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Modernity

Couze Venn and Mike Featherstone

Theory Culture Society

2006; 23; 457

DOI: 10.1177/0263276406064829

http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/2-3/457

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by Michal Pabis on February 27, 2007

The online version of this article can be found at:

Modernity

Couze Venn and Mike Featherstone

Abstract Whilst presenting a number of features that have been put forward to char-

acterize modernity as a way of life and a social system, this entry suggests a dissident

genealogy that reveals a hidden history of continuities and alternatives. It thereby prob-

lematizes the norms about periodization and the assumptions about the elaboration of

a logos that underlie the concept of the modern. This approach to modernity as a

complex of processes, institutions, subjectivities, and technologies challenges the more

familiar history of linear temporalities and progressive transformations. The fruitfulness

of seeing modernity, as much as other historical periods, as hybrid assemblages in a state

of flux is that it draws attention to the heterogeneity and processual nature of cultures

and feeds into the possibility of the critique of the present.

Keywords capitalism, dissident genealogy, modernism, public sphere, religion, techno-

cratic reason, tradition

those who are comforted by the progressive value attached to modernity, and for those

who take it for granted that we know what modernity is. His intervention came after a

period of often irate polemics around the loose concept of the postmodern that had started

to appear from the 1960s, especially with regard to the changing relation of the arts to the

project of the ‘emancipation of humanity’, and in relation to the perception of a crisis of legit-

imation, forcefully signalled in the work of Habermas and Lyotard from the late 1970s. His

emphasis on modernity as a hybrid assemblage – constituted in, and constitutive of, ‘social

needs and natural reality, meanings and mechanisms, signs and things’ (1993: 35) – that a

certain discourse of modernity disassociates and makes invisible, calls up the contrasting prob-

lematization initiated by Foucault in The Order of Things . That pivotal work in the contem-

porary understanding of modernity identified a new, if enigmatic, object of knowledge, ‘Man’,

as the central figure constituted through the dynamic but unstable intersection of three new

fields of enquiry and domains of practice, namely, language, life, labour. Whilst Latour argued

against the purification of an episteme as a discursive strategy in the constitution of modernity

as different from preceding epochs, Foucault claims that modernity is announced in the shift

from the system of representation that pertains to the classical age towards the new logos,

centered on the epistemic subject, inscribed in the human sciences. It should be noted,

however, that Foucault is careful to temper the claim of epistemic break with the proviso of

conditions of possibility and thus the possibility that ‘man’ may well be erased ‘like a face

drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (1966: 398). The point of highlighting the problematic

status of modernity is to put into context the new form of purification at work today which

is seeking to bring about through a renewed modernization the age of the market and of the

economic subject as its calculating agent. Much is at stake, therefore, concerning a critique of

the present, in one’s interpretation of modernity as a period.

Though explicitly or implicitly present in a great deal of the literature in the arts and phil-

osophy from the 19th century, the concept of modernity has not always enjoyed the current

prominence in the conceptual landscape of the social sciences. In the postwar era, up until the

London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 23(2–3): 457–476. DOI: 10.1177/0263276406064829

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L atour’s (1993) claim that we have never been modern is particularly provocative for

458 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

mid 1970s in sociology, it was capitalism which was the dominant term. The influential Intro-

duction to the History of Sociology (Barnes, 1966) has no place for modernity in the index,

although it had a large number of references to capitalism. Anthony Giddens’ (1973) key early

work Capitalism and Modern Social Theory clearly indicates the emphasis by foregrounding

capitalism, which is prominent in the index, whereas there is no place for modern or modernity.

Yet by the early 1990s the focus for Giddens was more directly on spelling out the contours

of modernity in books with titles such as The Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and

Identity . In cultural studies, it may well be possible to chart a similar shift with Stuart Hall

and his associates producing the influential Open University volume Formation of Modernity

in 1992. When terminology shifts it is possible to see this renaming process as a strategic move

in the field of academic and intellectual cultural production (Bourdieu). Our task is to examine

what is at stake in such shifts.

Our approach is to bring into view a longer and more diffracted history of the modern, so

that the break with classical antiquity from the 16th century and the quarrel of the ancients

and the moderns in the 17th century appear as part of the landscape. A literature has emerged

that regards developments in the European Renaissance as announcing an early modernity, and

here one could refer to Dante, da Vinci, Luther, Cervantes, Augustine’s reflections on time,

memory and the self, Arabic science and medicine, the Copernican revolution, the emergence

of the New World as significant markers of the shifts in the imagination and the gaze that

prepare the ground for the later reorganization of knowledge that one associates with

modernity. Foucault strikingly began his study of these shifts with Velasquez’s painting ‘Las

Meninas’ (1656) to bring to light the re-centring and de-centring of the gaze that fractures

the ideal of classical representation, and betrays the lack at the heart of its episteme. The more

familiar meaning of the term began to appear from the 18th century when the verb ‘to modern-

ize’ first appears in the English language, introduced to denote alterations to buildings, language

and fashions. From the mid-19th century in Europe the modern acquires the connotation of

improvement and efficiency that persists in the common usage, a meaning that has acquired

the force of dogma in the current largely neoliberal strategy of an injunction to ‘modernize’

or disappear.

A different line of interrogation of modernity, and a different periodization, is indicated by

Todorov (1992[1982]), who identifies 1492 as the birthmark of modernity, arguing that the

linking of knowledge with dispossession and subjugation triggered by the colonization of the

Americas must be seen as a central feature of modern reason. Serres (1982) similarly noted

the association of reason with subjugating power that follows when the reason/reasoning of

the mightiest comes to be always identified with the ‘best reason’. Thus, from the beginning,

the tensions in the modern reorganization of knowledge are bound up, on the one hand, with

the effects of power and with the form of economy and governmentality emerging at the time;

on the other hand, they attest to the alternative visions and trajectories side-lined when

modernity acquires the force of a project of worlding a world according to a singular vision

and temporalization of history.

Alongside these developments one finds certain themes that echo with the ambivalences

and paradoxes signalled in Latour’s claim and in the debates about the postmodern, specifi-

cally, regarding the claim that the modern effects a break with tradition or community, as in

Tonnies’ dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft , the notion of disenchantment that

Weber detects in the privilege of instrumental rationality, and the idea of alienation and

evanescence expressed in Marx, and explored in different registers from Baudelaire to

Benjamin and Marshall Berman (1983). They are themes that surface in different forms in the

history of modernity, expressing the enigmatic quality that, following Buci-Glucksmann

(1994), one could refer to as ‘baroque reason’, that is, a reason that opens up the hetero-

geneous and inassimilable zone where the affinity between thought and affect and ‘the infinite

materiality of bodies and images’ (1994: 139) are played out in visions of the uncanny, the

horrifying, the ‘strange beauty’ and ‘swift joys’ explored in the modern aesthetics (Venn,

2000). At the worst of times, such as in the wake of Fascism, the violence latent in these

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Problematizing Global Knowledge – Modernity 459

themes has been embodied in the destructive figure of the ‘angel of progress’ as depicted in

Benjamin’s vision of modernity as the ceaseless production of the new on the ruins of the old.

It is important to note that in the post-Enlightenment period these ambivalences and mis-

givings about the modern have been amply elaborated or refigured in dissident works and

thoughts in movements like Romanticism (see Bowie, 1990) and in conceptualizations of life

and the living – in Leibnizian science as well as in early vitalist discourse – at odds with Mech-

anism and Newtonian natural philosophy that were becoming hegemonic from the 18th

century. Of course works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Goethe’s Faust were them-

selves exemplarily modern. One should add to this problematization the effects of opposi-

tional politics in Europe and the colonies that drew on the emancipatory and critical elements

within Enlightenment discourse in support of resistance to the advances of capitalism and

emergent imperial governmentality. They reveal a genealogy of counter and alternative moder-

nities, of ‘the insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, 1984: 42) that we shall address

below, focusing on a number of features that have come to be thought central to modernity.

A persistent feature of the discourse of modernity is the fact that in its emergence it has

instigated a dichotomy between modern and traditional societies, that is, between processes

of legitimation and the inscription of meaning based in rational calculations and institutions,

in legal contract and individual volition as opposed to custom, religion and communal forms

of wealth. Whilst clearly modernity has seen the emergence of state and non-state institutions

that have not existed before, and whilst one can understand the logic of difference at work in

this discursive constitution of modernity, analyses of modern culture too often forget the

reality of the vestiges and mutations of older values, beliefs and ways of being, for instance

regarding feudalism, monarchism, and ‘traditional’ forms of sovereignty and power that co-

exist with secular state institutions. For example, for a long time in Europe and in many colon-

ized states, family law remained the prerogative of the church or religion and ‘tradition’. In

any case, the values that secular law inscribes often have a foundation in religious and

traditional belief systems. Indeed a dissident genealogy of modernity would restore, amongst

other things, the central place that non-conformist beliefs like Unitarianism and Deism

continued to have in shaping the transformations in society that have made the world as

modern – in education, in legislation, in the opposition to slavery, in the history of socialism

and even the development of the Enlightenment. In its making of difference, the discourse of

modernity has reconstructed a view of preceding periods and a sense of its own coherence

that simply does not accord with the historical reality. The operation of this systemic discur-

sive distortion has been equally at work in the understanding of concepts of civilization, of

nation, of the Orient and the ‘Other’, and of science itself.

Conventionally, in the social sciences, a series of terms like secularism, democracy, tech-

nology, the nation-state, citizenship, industrialization, urbanization comes to mind to qualify

what one means by modernity. One may even add to that list ideas of the epistemological

superiority of science, the autonomy of reason and the law, the existence of a public sphere,

human rights, a number of fundamental freedoms, individual ownership of property and indi-

vidualism. But as soon as one starts to make such a check-list of the characteristics or the

criteria that one would use to distinguish a modern society from a non-modern one, or to

categorize modernity as a period, one begins to encounter difficulties. Not only is it the case

that many states that take their modernity for granted do not display many of the key features

that social theory ascribes to modernity; the point is that all these terms are open to prob-

lematization. In fact if one were to imagine the ideal-type of modern state, almost no existing

state qualifies. For instance the political institutions of the USA may in principle be secular,

but religion, although technically a separate sphere from the state, continues to occupy a

central place both symbolically and at the level of legitimation. Indeed, appeal to a transcen-

dent domain in the institution of modernity and in the authorization of everyday practices in

conditions of modernity is deeply ingrained. The effect of the neglect of belief systems in the

history of modernity is yet to be properly established; it will completely alter our view of

modern cultures. Similarly, arguments that point to the emergence of a ‘society of control’

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460 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

and ‘Empire’ undermine faith in the existence of democracy even in the so-called ‘advanced’

states. Latour’s claim in a sense draws attention to counter-discourses that open the way for

a questioning not only of modernity as a period, but of the system of classification and peri-

odization that have been taken as paradigmatic for a considerable time.

The notion of a break with ‘tradition’ and with the old, central to the modern imaginary,

has its exemplary instantiation in Descartes’ gesture of tabula rasa , that is, of brushing aside

from the table of knowledge the authority of ancient texts; it is the gesture whereby the clean

slate of reason and evidence is made to replace appeal to an ultimately transcendent author-

ity. Older knowledges may be readmitted but subject to the critical and sceptical judgement

of a rational method, uncluttered by faith and dogmas. This gesture also installs the epistemic

subject in the place of the logos or principle guaranteeing rational thought, and so inaugurates

a privilege of cognitivism, and the ‘forgetting’ of metaphysics that remain symptomatic well

into so-called postmodern times. One encounters it today in the models of artificial intelli-

gence that assume a unitary, autonomous, rational, self-sufficient mind or brain. This assump-

tion about a singular author of truth runs counter to the collaborative and inter-subjective

reality of the process of production and validation of knowledge, then and now, as the social

studies of science have established; it is to be hoped that new information technologies like

the Internet and digitalization will undermine such assumptions, though they too will have to

change, for the hold of logocentrism runs deep in the conceptual and technical apparatus of

modernity and postmodernity.

Another instance of a construction by the social sciences that casts into invisibility features

central to the institution of modern societies concerns the question of the emergence of a public

sphere which, since the early studies by Habermas (1983 [1980]), has been thought intrinsic

to modernity. The argument is that in democratic societies new public spaces have emerged for

the formation of public opinion about matters concerning the good order of the state; they

facilitate the free exchange of information and rational debate, and thus help to constitute an

informed public capable of making rational choices about issues relating to group and national

interests. Yet the dichotomous framing of modernity has meant that liberal as well as many

radical accounts of this element of the democratic polity have tended to neglect the role both

of traditional sites – the marketplace, the church – and dissident forums located in local or

communal settings. The history of resistance demonstrates the extent to which mechanisms

were invented that served the goals of dissident publics in the modern period. This includes a

large number of societies and associations, such as syndicalist organizations or ‘combinations’,

mutual help associations, salons and societies like the Lunar Society, as well as non-conformist

sects, such as the Quakers, or the Unitarian Church. Such new elements of the public spheres

emerging in response to bourgeois institutions and spaces, and thus themselves belonging to

modernity, nevertheless relied on values and socialities that reconstituted older social relations

and ways of being or constituted new publics that one should describe as hybrid.

Thus, Linebaugh and Rediker (2000) show the extent to which sailors, slaves, and common-

ers constituted a kind of ‘many-headed hydra’ forging new alliances and fomenting rebellion.

This process is even clearer when one considers the history of slave and colonial resistance.

For instance, Genovese (1974) shows the importance of ambulant preachers and religious gath-

erings, the role of the Book alongside mutations in music and songs and ways of storytelling

in forming opinion and coordinating action that sustained rebellion (something Toni Morrison

has dramatized and analysed in her writings). Similarly, the Subaltern Studies Group has shown

the extent to which new emergent forms of organization and knowledges and older ‘traditional’

institutions and sites combined to determine the form and modalities of resistance to subju-

gation in India, for instance about the Santal, Basarat, and Sepoy uprisings, or jute workers

organization (studies by Guha, Pandey, and Chakrabarty in Guha and Spivak, 1988). Whilst

print technology was important in these activities, the interesting issue is both the emergence

of non-bourgeois publics and spheres and the process of circulation of ideas through the

network of dissident groups that has tended to remain mostly invisible in accounts of

modernity. Whilst it can be argued that these forms of resistance are modern, it is also the

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