Modernity and Beyond:An Illustrated History

Sergei MedvedevHSE, Moscow

Origins of Modernity• Concept formulated in the late 19th century:

distinguish “modernity” from “antiquity”• The origins of modernity: Enlightenment? Scientific

Revolution? Westphalia? Reformation? Renaissance?• Anthony Giddens: “modes of social life or

organization which emerged in Europe from about the 17th century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence. This associates modernity with a time period and with initial geographic location.”

Breaking with the Past

• The social world is dominated by – Asceticism (Lutheran/Calvinist practices among the

dominant classes of Northern Europe), – Secularization, – Instrumental rationality, – Differentiation of various spheres of life, – Bureaucratization of economics, policy and war– Universalism of money and monetary values

Meanings of Modernity

• Four meanings of modernity:– philosophical: secularization, humanism, a person

positioned in history (laws of perspective)– practical: great geographic discoveries, science,

capitalism and early industrialization, money– political: centralization of power (absolutism),

monopolization of violence (gunpowder and regular armies), territorial control, the nation state

– Geopolitical: spread of Western imperialism, emergence of the World-system

Defining Modernity• Jürgen Habermas: Modernity as the project of

universal emancipation• Alberto Martinelli: Modernity means a growing

structural differentiation of societies• Marshall Berman: Modernity is “a mode of vital

experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils”

• Zygmunt Bauman: Modernity as the practice of filling in the blank spaces in the compleat mappa mundi

Science• Copernicus (1473-1543), • Galileo Galilei (1564-1642); anti-Aristotle; anti-

Ptolemy, e pur si muove; – ‘The Book of Nature is written in the language of

Mathematics’ – Scientists now have the task of reading it• Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) theoretically refined

Copernicus’ theory of the heliocentric planetary system

• René Descartes (1596-1630): understanding the world according to mechanical laws of nature

• Isaac Newton (1642-1727): theorized the role of the force of gravity; universal laws of physics– ‘Abstract and geometrized Universe, governed by the

fundamental principle of gravitation’ (Braudel)

Philosophy

• Francis Bacon (1561-1626): – Novum Organum [New Logic] as opposed to Organum of

Aristotle and its deductive nature; anti-scholastic; – the founder of the inductive notion of science: from the

particular to the general;– mastering nature as a central goal; – ‘KNOWLEDGE ITSELF IS POWER’

• Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794): – the tenth period of human development, the “indefinite”

perfectibility of the human race would become irreversible – Idea of progress as a teleological view of human

development

Individualism

• Individualism as a legacy of modernity– The individual is the key unit of analysis;– The individual both object and subject of power’s

exercise;– The individual is a rational autonomous moral

actor.

• The impact on the environment

The Discovery of Society

• Rather than the power of an individual, structuralism concerns the power exerted by the social environment: traditions, customs, practices, and institutions;– individualism: the whole is defined by adding up its parts; – Structuralism: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts;

• Émile Durkheim: the society has a life on its own and “although society may be nothing without individuals, each of them is much more a product of society than he is its maker”

High Modernity and Structuralism

• Pierre Bourdieu: individuals internalize as “mental dispositions” and “schemes of perceptions and thought” (habitus) the organization of their external reality;

• Claude Lévi-Strauss: the myths that ground social life reflect the structure of the collective human mind; cultural institutions are the external projections and manifestations of universal structures;

• Durkheim, Bourdieu, and Lévi-Strauss: individuality and freedom arise only through human interaction, and the latter ever occurs within social structures that constrain, channel, and enable behavior

Poststructuralism and Postmodernism

• Ferdinand de Saussure: meaning is not determined by a stable relation of words to concrete things or even to conceptual representations of these things; it is determined by the intricate relation of words to other words

• Michel Foucault: The power of language, discourse– Discourse = speech immersed into life

• Jacques Derrida: the linguistic turn in philosophy– Deconstruction (Husserl’s phenomenological reduction,

bracketing out the empirical connections of the language)– The world is text, Il n’y a pas de hors-texte

Capitalism and Postmodernity• Market capitalism (18th to late 19th century): the

steam-driven motor and realism. • Monopoly capitalism (late 19th to mid-20th century):

electric and internal combustion motors and modernism

• Consumer capitalism (emphasis on marketing, selling, and consuming commodities, not on producing them): electronic technologies, and postmodernism.

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 1991

Capitalism and Postmodernity

An historic shift in the West to a new form of capitalism – to the ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism, and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range of ‘identity politics.’

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 2004

Metaphors of Postmodernity

• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Tree and rhizome. ‘Thousand plateau’, ‘Schizophrenic discourse’

• Manuel Castells: The Network Society• The Internet: Hypertext• Art: Intertextuality• Jean-François Lyotard: Rejecting metanarratives• De-centeration, de-essentialization and

deconstruction. • Baudrillard: Simulation and Simulacra• Beck: Risk Society

Postmodernism as Relativism

“Postmodernity is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanations.”

“Against these Enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, undergrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of skepticism about objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of natures and the coherence of identities.”

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 2004

Questioning Science and Progress• Rejecting the scientific element of modernism: No

objective knowledge– Newton physics versus Quantum Physics and Chaos Theory,

Einstein’s Relativity, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle– Relativity and instability of nature (and knowledge)

• Modernists and liberals both believe in progress Submission of the laws of society to science or to human

autonomy

• Postmodernists reject the faith in the autonomy and freedom of the individual, and the faith in progress

• Ulrich Beck: the Risk Society• No longer avoiding risk but integrating it, weaving it into

the fabric of society

Constructing Identity

• Ironic demeanor, a perspectivist denial of epistemological or ethical foundations, of “human nature”

• Instead of human nature, we have fluid identity

• Social construction of identity– No single human nature, human identities are

continually being constructed and contested within protean social environments;

– Yet, people can choose who they are or what they want to be