Different Modalities of Modernity:

Imagined, Alternative, Global, etc.

Assistant Professor erif ESENDEMR

Imagining the Modern Age

Exaggeration

and fetishism of modernity

Modernity as a classificatory concept
`Crisis of modernity`
Antiquity, ancientness, the quality of being old
What's Modern and What's Not in the Modern Age?
Nationalism is a modern phenomenon, whereas ethnocentrism is
not
4 ways in which the special quality of modern life has been
described: the philosophic, sociological, political, and aesthetic
conceptions of modernity
1) Philosophic conception:
Association of modernity with self-conscious break with tradition and
receive of the authority initiated by, among others, Bacon, Descartes, and
the philosophers of the Enlightenment
Modernity as a `project`: Conscious break with traditional authority and the
assertion of control over the external environment by means of the
development of scientific and technological knowledge

Imagining the Modern Age

2) The sociological conception:

Starts with changing conditions and relations of social existence,
rather than with changing ideas.
Attention primarily on the new forms of association created by
capitalism and industrial society and the break with traditional
authorities and customs that they have introduced
As a result, modernity is opposed to tradition in the sociological
conception, rather than to antiquity or the Catholic Middle Ages, as
in the philosophic conception

3) The political conception:

Attention on the replacement of religious and aristocratic political
hierarchies with more egalitarian and democratic forms of political
legitimacy
French Revolution as the great symbol of political modernity the
point at which many scholars locate "the birth of modernity
The new, more democratic forms of political legitimacy introduced
by the Revolution

Imagining the Modern Age

4) The aesthetic conception:

Association of modernity with certain styles in art and literature,
styles that begin to emerge in the last half of the nineteenth
century and are commonly described as modernism
Baudelaire's celebration of modernity as the special quality of
those new works of art that seek beauty and meaning in the
ephemeral, in the constantly shifting conditions of modern
existence, rather than in eternal forms, is the classic statement of
this conception
These four ways of characterizing modernity focus our attention in
different directions: toward ideas, social conditions, perceptions of
political legitimacy, and aesthetic styles
And they locate the birth of modernity in very different periods: in
the seventeenth century for the philosophic conception, the late
eighteenth century for the sociological and political conceptions,
and the late nineteenth century for the aesthetic conception

Modernity and Tradition

Nevertheless, there is something that all four of these conceptions of

modernity have in common: a focus on breaking with traditional
authority and the accelerated and unprecedented rate of change that
such activity brings about

In the philosophic conception this break with traditional authority is

undertaken intentionally as a way of setting humankind on a new
path

In the sociological conception it is a striking feature of everyday life,

exemplified by both the secularization of public authority and the
constant revolutionizing of the material conditions of life introduced
by industrial production and modern technology

In the political conception it is an unavoidable fact of life in a political

system in which inherited hierarchy no longer legitimates political
authority

In the aesthetic conception of modernity the break with traditional

authority is exemplified by the avant-garde artist's

Modernity and Tradition

Even the most modern of modern societies display, as Ernest Gellner has
suggested, some of the incoherence of a badly decorated modern
apartment in which "the plumbing, lighting and structure are all high-tech
but "the furnishing and decoration is strictly period. The physical
appearance and material infrastructure of these societies all point to the
influence of distinctly modern ideas and modes of organization. But the
political and cultural life that adorns and legitimates these structures is a
confusing melange of constitutional antiques, traditional forms, and
modernist gestures

Challenging Euro/American-centered conceptualizations of modernity

The challenges of Euromodernity

The idea of alternative modernities with reference to Asian societies.

Global discourse

Monopoly on modernity

Modernity was a unique product of European history

Modernity is cultureless, and can be deployed in service of different

cultural legacies

Modernization as progress from tradition (culture)

Modernity and Binary Oppositions

Chinese

distinction, for example, between

substance(ti) and function(yong) where the one
referred to native values and the other to the
practices of modernity
The relationships between the spaces of modernity
its social and cultural as well as political spaces
Binary opposition between modernity and tradition
in modernization discourse

Modernity and Universalism

Issues

of universalism and particularism

Alternative modernity is similar to postcolonial
criticism in general
Capitalism is not culture-free
We all dwell in modernity, but experience it
differently
Jerry Bentley has been critical of what he
describes as modernocentrism
The fetishization of change and the pursuit of
novelty

Summary

1. Alternative modernity represents the latest gloss on an idea that

has been controversial since its origins
This time around, it is occasioned by the arrival in modernity of
societies outside of Europe and North America whose claims to
difference are empowered by reconfiguration of political and
economic relations globally
A basic problem is its avoidance of questions raised by these
reconfigurations

2. Reified notions of regional (most pervasively, clichs of east and

west), civilizational or national cultures are products of modernity,
and of little help in disentangling its cultural complexities
They also nourish a new parochialism (a narrow or limited
outlook). On the other hand, to the extent that they fail to address
issues of their broader context, locally situated claims to
alternatives represent strategies of survival or for elites ludic
experiments with modernity that do not point to any serious
alternatives outside or beyond a global modernity ruled by the
political economy of capital

Summary
3.

The claims to difference that drive the search for

alternatives have been most important for drawing
attention to the historicity of modernity in its origins (if
that is identifiable at all), unfolding, and consequences
Historicizing modernity is of the utmost significance in its
comprehension both as concept and as historical phenomenon
A thoroughgoing historicism calls for the deconstruction not
only of the hegemonic assumptions of Euromodernity but also
new hegemonies that nourish off cultural reification
Difference is a quality not just of relations between nations,
civilizations, etc.
Historicism thus understood is a democratizing method not only
in countering the hegemonic suppressions of Euromodernity but
also in rescuing from oblivion pasts erased by national or
civilizational homogenization of diversity and historical
experience

Summary

4. Basic to my argument above is that critical understanding and

deployment of modernity as concept calls for a recognition that it is
ultimately a discourse of self-representations that also imply
representations of Othersin the past or the present. Substantive
definitions of modernity are at best of historical interest
Some distinguishing features of modernity are not modern at all
On the other hand, what constitutes modernity, or what may be
allowed into its domain has changed over time, as is indicated by
the radical transformations in its content over the last half century
(including claims to alternative modernities)
Economic and technological modernization is all that remains of
anything like a common consensus over modernity (science itself
having come under attack even in the birthplaces of
Euromodernity)
My argument above has been driven by the assumption of globality
as a condition of modernity, and an insistence that spatial
relationships between societies must be integral to any accounting
of their temporalities

Summary

5. Self-representations of modernity are typically phrased in the

language of progress, and suppress what may seem regressive
Modernity is identified in most discourses as a realm of improved
physical, political and cultural welfare for most of humanity
What these discourses ignore is the dark side of modernity that
is responsible for historically unprecedented forces of alienation,
deprivation, human insecurity, racist intolerance and mass
slaughter
At the same time, it is important not to ignore in the criticism of
Euromodernity the darkness that is equally the legacy of the
many cultural traditions that are invoked in claims to alternativity.
It is frequently forgotten in contemporary discourses that the point
is not just to rescue the present from the legacies of colonial
modernity but to struggle against injustice and oppression,
whatever their origins

Summary
Products of Euromodernity such as science, democracy
and human rights are crucial to such struggle
If difference is grasped in its contemporaneityas a
product of modernityit makes little sense to invoke
imagined pasts, which presently only serves to feeds
reactionary nostalgia and politics globally including in
Europe and North America
The goal is rather to move past a globalized capitalist
modernity marked by conflicting ethnocentrisms toward the
transvaluation of those values from the perspective of a
human-centered consciousness that is global but also
attentive to places and consciousness of everyday life

Summary
6.

Our choice of whether or not we retain modernity as a

historical concept, or how we deal with its history needs to be
pragmatic but not therefore arbitrary
Aside from their historiographical implications, our choices entail
political consequences
My critique of the alternative modernities idea has been driven most
importantly by a concern over its deployment in authoritarian
traditionalisms that have enjoyed a resurgence with the decline of
revolutionary visions of alternatives to capitalist modernity
Global modernity is driven increasingly by an alliance of capitalism,
political authoritarianism, and a cultural traditionalism inflected by a
culture of consumption
It seems to me that what is needed most at this present conjuncture
Therefore, is a reconceptualization of modernity that opens up the
universalist democratic promises of Euromodernity to recognition of
values and practices in other histories in the construction of a new
modernity

Summary
One that presupposes commonality in difference rather
than an abstractly conceived universal identity, and
places general human welfare over and above the wellbeing of capital or the fetishized promises of endless
technological innovation
The search for a common future needs to start with the
re-envisioning of fragmented pasts as a treasurehouse of a common human legacy, whose subject is
not national or civilizational in a narrow sense but
broadly humana Euromodern political fiction that is
no less important for being fictional, and one that has
much to recommend itself against competing
ethnocentric fictions
It is also an idea that is by now a common heritage of
peoples globally