There are several views and attitudes on what modernity means. The word is etymologically linked to an existence in the present. But “the present” is always a slice of time, so the question, what is modernity, from one point of view, remains one of periodization. For some, modernity may be the 21st century. But this is more properly contemporaneity, meaning being-with time or being-alongside time rather being-in existence or being-in time. The difference between being-in time and being-with time is one of the static and the dynamic. To be-in is to exist in a medium of definable temporality while being-with supposes an independent entity with which we are in relation, which moves with us or rather, with which we move, which we’re trying always to catch up with. The 21st c. is also known as the Anthropocene Era. We will have occasion to consider these terms later. For some, modernity is the period from the 1980s. But this is more properly the postmodern era, when the idea of a single or homogeneous modernity is put to question. For some, it is the 1960s which inaugurate modernity, but this is more properly post-War and postcolonial modernity, an era which suppressed aggressive racial and ethnocentric white nationalism while pluralizing cultural histories in the form of independent nations. It was also the era inaugurating a technological ontology, which means it normalized global transport and telecommunication technologies, putting them at the service of multinational capital. For some, modernity, starts with the 20th c., but this is the period of philosophical and cultural modernism and nationalism, when the modes of thought proper to modernity began being challenged as did the forms of art normal to modernity. For some, modernity begins in the 19th c., but this is more properly an Industrial modernity, marked by mass production based on fossil fuel technology, modular production and assembly line manufacture. It is also the birth of a political modernity with the aftermath of the American and French revolutions with their ideals and constitutions. For some it begins in the 17th c., and here we’re coming closer to the source of the changes leading to our times, seen as a way of being.
The 17th c. is marked by what is called the European Enlightenment. This is an intellectual revolution that consolidated the movement known as the Renaissance started in the 15th and 16th centuries, to decenter the epistemological and political authority of the Church. This intellectual revolution was not a homogenous movement or a conspiracy. It arose in various minds but gathered strength by consolidating its common elements and building its views based on these. We may refer to this as an epistemological revolution in its external aspect, because it led to the starting of the institutions of higher education which we call universities today. Though the university as we know it was more properly born in the 19th c., its foundations were laid in the 17th c. in terms of the specialization of disciplines and the formalization of methodologies that we today think of as scientific. This external aspect rests on its internal aspect, that of a privileged definition of the human as a rational being. Reason came to replace and stabilize the transcendental authority of the Father-God of the Church in authorizing knowledge. For several of the early Enlightenment thinkers, it was not a loss of faith but a change of faith that this represented. Reason was God’s prime faculty, the Logos, in early Christian thought equable with Christ, now theorized as an immanent property of the human, the chosen elect of God. The exercise of Reason could reveal the secrets of the Creation and complete the unfinished work of God in building a perfect world. This kind of faith invested the thinking of a class of Enlightenment theology known as Deism. Along with this the objective focus shifted from Spirit to Matter, as a firm universal datum available empirically to all, rather than an invisible essence that needed the transcendental authority of the Church for validation. These displacements stabilized a historical rupture from the “medieval period,” now dubbed “the Dark Ages,” characterized by dogma, superstitions and cruel Church authority exercised through frightful Inquisitions. But the decentering of epistemological authority, if it heralded reason and democracy, also brought finitude and relativism to the field of human knowing. Knowledge now needed methodical piecing together to fulfill the assumption of recovering the Wholeness of the Logos. The finitude of human lives in time and their distribution in space required protocols for the passage, transmission and translation of knowledge across borders of time and space. This was achieved through the formalization of the scientific method, not merely as a method of knowing but as the foundation of academic discourse, research methodology, to be instituted in the new halls of learning, the university.
The contradictions and consequences of this historical rupture need to be contemplated. In centering human identity in Reason, it automatically distanced and objectified its “others,” those perceived not to be invested with the privilege of Reason, women, children, romantics, mystics, madmen, the illiterate, animals, plants, the earth, the non-living, the non-Western human. To be bound to the rational subject, these had to be made property and subordinated, assimilated or eliminated. Born in a feudal Europe, still patronized by royal courts and churches, the Enlightenment’s project of Knowledge mixed inevitably with the designs of Power. Its expansive/expensive voyages of discovery led inevitably to colonization, exploitation, possession and enjoyment, capitalism and the world market dominated by the West. Its project of universal knowledge extended to a colonization of the life-world in the form of a new institution, the knowledge academy, which yoked all humanity into its world-making design. At the same time, its project of power extended itself in the form of two new institutions, the multinational corporation, an engine of private profit-making, and the nation-state, ostensibly serving the will of the population through rational governmentality, but in fact, securing the designs of capital. As we can see, binaries proliferated everywhere, white and colored, reason and emotion, mind and life, mind and body, science and humanities, with the first in all these pairs subordinating the second. The privileging of Matter as the object of Knowledge and Mind as its subject exiled Spirit and subordinated the intangible aspects of human emotion. This collusive arrangement, coupled with the drive for universal and absolute Knowledge and its use to perfect the world for human habitation and enjoyment led to the privileging of Science and Technology in the academy and the utilization of their research to fuel the corporate motives of the market economy. The commodification of life that this resulted in has led to the present form of social life, extending individual freedom with one hand and tearing communities apart into a condition of alienation with the other. The subjective isolation of a rational humanism has aided the universal capitalization of society and the commodification of space, time, beings and things.
In tracing modernity back to its roots in the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, we encountered the chapters in the progress of modernity. These chapters mark an advance in the narrative of objective knowledge and technology at the service of capital and ideology. Colonialism, Industrialism, Modernism, Nationalism, Technological ontology, Postmodernism and the Anthropocene Era are the names of these chapters. From the start of its world-making ambition, modernity assumed a perfected universal condition while it encountered its many others. Its conflicted motives sought on the one hand to exploit its others for profit and on the other to make them one with itself through rational education, its “white man’s burden.” Through the 20th c., while its exploitative and corporate designs proliferated, its “others” sought their independence. The global spread of modernity inaugurated the age of world history. Whereas cultures and religions remained in relative isolation in premodernity, they were forced into cohabitation and relativized within a space-time of global and contemporary co-existence, all cultural difference subordinated to the prehistory of the modern West and needing to come to terms with their self-evaluation. The 20th c. was racked by two World Wars which brought the world close to the brink of extinction. These wars were also elements in the advance of modernity, with feudalism and/or racialism and ethnic nationalist subjectivism pitted against liberal universality. The post-World War 2 period saw what seemed the elimination of feudalism, racialism and ethnocentric nationalism, but in fact, only their suppression, in favor of liberal universalism. It also saw the end of colonialism and the rise of non-Western nations, all it seems, in service to a rational liberal universality covering the globe through the agency of multinational corporate capital supported by the universal knowledge academy, the universal governmentality of nation-states and advanced integrative technologies. This world homogenizing stage of modernity is one of global neo-liberal capitalism, that has brought us into the 21st c., the Anthropocene Era of contemporaneity. We refer to this period as the Anthropocene, as a geological age descriptor, because the human footprint now spans the earth. There is no place on earth which the marks of human production and consumption have not modified, human surveillance not mapped. Our individual state of being has transformed to the non-local and omni-temporal, technologically prostheticized to an instantaneous global cyberspace. It seems we have reached an apotheosis not even dreamed of by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, an individualized Omnipresence, Omniscience and Omnipotence without precedent.
But is this really the hour of modernity’s triumph? And what about the “others” of modernity under this corporate empire? The progress of modernity has not been without its trials and challenges. From the start of the 20th c., both the sciences and the arts revolted, it seems, against the ontology, psychology and cultural norms of post-Enlightenment modernity. Modern Physics, in probing both nanoscopic and astrophysical ends of cosmology, encountered paradoxes which a classical materialist model could not solve. What made it even more problematic is that these paradoxes of Quantum Physics seemed to suggest that Mind could not be extricated from Matter in our experience and knowledge; in other words, whatever we call the objective world is always already entangled with the subject. Moreover these paradoxes seemed to point to nonlocality and atemporality at the foundation of reality. In the arts, whether in literature or poetry, painting or music, new experimental forms arose which challenged the objective perception of reality. Language defied syntax and arranged itself in a stream of consciousness or in non-propositional bursts of intuition; art rejected the norm of perspective, modeling and chiaroscuro which had become the mark of civilized visual representation since the Renaissance and replaced these with the subjective distortion of expressionism, cubism, abstraction and surrealism; music experimented with modes or alternative temporalities. All these changes constituted the cultural revolution known as Modernism, a countercultural response to modernity. The subjectivism of the arts also acknowledged their recognition of their marginalized place in modernity, their “uselessness” in a world defined by technological progress. Their response inaugurated a global cultural politics, a critique of modernity and an acknowledgment of their alienation and precarity. The new academic and therapeutic discipline of psychology, in the hands of practitioners such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, declared the rational subject to be the tip of the iceberg of the human psyche, determined by a sunken Subconscious and Unconscious of irrational drives in the case of Freud and a Collective Unconscious of archetypes according to Jung. Towards the end of the 19th c., the analysis of the modern economy by Marx exposed the tensions and internal contradictions of a social form based on private property ownership and capitalism and theorized an ideal classless society, albeit based on rational foundations. Among philosophers, Nietzsche at the end of the 19th c. proposed the Will to Power as more primordial than the rational will to knowledge, the latter, in fact, as a form of the will to power. Based on this he also rejected the static image of the human or the cosmos, revising human identity into one without essence, subject to transit beyond itself, a destining towards an Overhuman (Ubermensch).
These intellectual revolutions did not have much of an effect on the march of technology and its capitalization into a market ontology advantaging the Western male rational subject as the privileged locus of the modern human. Through the first half of the 20th c., anticolonial struggles and two World Wars put an end to Western property “ownership” of the rest of the world and resulted in the birth of independent nations across the world. These nations had often staked their claim for independence on the right to cultural self-determination. At the same time, colonialism’s civilizing drive had worked to normalize the values of the Enlightenment through education, administration and the construction of taste. In becoming independent, the question arose of how these new nations would impact the assumptions and goals of modernity. According to the self-confidence of the civilizational superiority of the West, it was only a matter of time before the pressures of world-modernity would even out the lumpy non-modern elements, leading to a homogeneous global condition of universal Enlightenment, something Francis Fukuyama has more recently called, following Hegel, “the end of history.”
From the mid to end 1960s, the internal critique of the West gathered strength, leading to popular movements of revolt among students and workers around 1968, originating in France and other continental nations, but spreading across the world. Simultaneously, this period saw the development of a Western countercultural movement, characterized by a utopian drive to be free of corporate and governmental structures, replacing these with communitarian societies of freedom from convention and collective sharing. These movements had a worldwide impact, partly due to the cultural expressions of idealism associated with them, most prominently, music. As mentioned earlier, the 60s saw the continued advancement of technological integration under the sign of capital, largely through the invention and utilization of electronic means and devices. On the one hand this led to the wide reach of the products of the counterculture, on the other to their swift capitalization, the latter leading to a semiotic appropriation and corruption of their ideals and ultimately the demise of the movement by 1980. The element of widespread psychedelic use as an aspect of the counterculture should also not be lost sight of, as it aided a subjectivism at odds with the rational norms of modernity. The post-1968 period also saw the rise of what has been called postmodern philosophy, as an intellectual culture of critique of the values, norms, ideals and ontology of post-Enlightenment modernity. Many continental thinkers, particularly originating in France, that we today associate with the founding of postmodernism or poststructuralism, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard were either participants or deeply impacted by the events of 1968, and their work was inspired by its ideals.
In the 1990s, with the advent of cyberspace and cyber-technologies, there emerged a phase of unprecedented capital integration leading to the worldwide era of neo-liberal globalization. Since this period, the world market has become increasingly borderless, nation-states increasingly tied to its global conservation and promotion. As far as the cultural differences of the non-Western world, one may see the emergence of three strands in the normalization of modernity, seen as a furtherance of post-Enlightenment ideology. One of these is the appearance of the universal liberal subject of global capital, a “mimic European.” In some cases, this subject is split in its identity between the home and the world, “modern” in its dealings in the world of global capital and “native” at home; in others there is a fuller excision of native identity in favor of post-Enlightenment modernity. A second emergence is that of the appropriation of cultural difference as a flavor of neo-liberal consumption. The tourist industries, the entertainment industries, the display industries, the industries of sensory experience, catering to taste, fashion, music and voyeuristic enjoyments, have witnessed a semiotic recoding into endlessly proliferating flavors of commodified multicultural consumption. The third emergence, is one which has refused assimilation into modernity. It has either rejected modernity entirely, embracing forms of nativistic or other premodern identity against modernity or claimed a dialogic right to participate in the creation of alternative modernities. It is this last possibility which interests us in this course. More pervasive in our time, however, is the first of these last options, that of the rejects of modernity, who reject it in turn, using its own devices to hold their own against it. A prescient book, written by sociologist Benjamin Barber, spells out a probable future based on the contest of these realities. Titled Jihad vs. McWorld, it envisages a world where the political state, whether national or global, has been bankrupted, the socius taken over by the uncontrolled universalization of capital in the form of ethnic-flavored global franchises. Against this, the disenfranchised rejects of modernity, whether in the name of orthodox religion or race or clan identity, have constructed their own distributed stateless anachronistic rogue societies existing by parasiting on the networks and resources of global capital and at perpetual war against the franchised corporate liberal world.
This brings us to the Anthropocene Era of the 21st c. As mentioned at the start of this essay, we live in an age of the apotheosis of Enlightenment ideals in the form of what seems an ontology of omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence. But this apparent triumphal hour of abundance and freedom is actually an appearance in which the global capital machine lives in all the inhabitants of the world, albeit through its wireless and non-local invisibilization. Seemingly liberated to consume whatever we want, our subjectivity is “dividualized” (i.e. divided and colonized through dynamic algorithmic profiling and targeting of its psychic fragments) by the transhuman technologies of neo-liberal capitalism. These have been called “control societies” by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Moreover, as we have seen, this apparent apotheosis has been achieved through the othering and exploitation of the non-rational world, the geosphere, the biosphere and the cultural sphere. All these foundations on which we stand are today in revolt, the engines of post-Enlightenment capital stymied by a climate crisis, a global pandemic and a proliferation of savage orthodoxies. More than ever before, this state of pitched ideological war needs healing. Towards this end, we return to the possibility of alternative modernities, of the participation of multiple cultural histories in creating a relational future of porous and mutually transformative interchanges. What are the conditions for such a worlding? A deep reflection on these conditions is the invitation of this course.
