Strangers, Ambivalence and Social Theory by Bülent Diken

Author:Bülent Diken [Diken, Bülent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138014671
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

Modernity-as-order

Berman reserves the honour of “wrestling inexhaustibly” with ambiguities of modernity for the modernists of the nineteenth century. According to him, conceptions of modernity later came to be based on “rigid polarities and flat totalizations”. Because of this, in the twentieth century, “modernity is either embraced by a blind and uncritical enthusiasm or else it is condemned with a neo-Olympian remoteness and contempt; in either case, it is conceived as a closed monolith…. Open visions of modern life have been supplanted by closed ones, Both/And by Either/Or” (Berman 1983: 24).

In this context, one can speak of largely used, broad and “orderly” periodizations and categorizations which miss the ambivalent, as was the case with the detraditionalization theses, which cannot perceive tradition-in-modernity or modernity-as-tradition. Or one can recall theories announcing that we were once modern and now we are in a postmodern period. These either/or pictures merely exemplify Berman’s point above.

The perspective of modernity-as-order is related to these inclinations in social theory. The term modernity-as-order indicates both the self-perception of a definite version of modernity and criticisms of modernity based on this perception. The stress in this context is not upon the decentring and liberating effects of modernity on the subject, but on the contrary, on the very creation of the subject, or “individuation”, instead of the heroic modernity of Baudelaire. The modernity we speak of here is much closer to the modernity of rationalization, bureaucratization, universalism, ethnocentrism or, in one phrase, almost all what “modernization” connotes. Above all, modernity in this sense is related to: firstly, the French Revolution, which formed its consciousness; secondly, the Industrial Revolution, which provided modernity with a material substance; and thirdly, processes of Westemalization, which have sought to assure the rest of the world that the West was the best and added a dimension of expansion to modernity (Kumar 1995: 82–83).

More or less acknowledging that “the period of modernity is also the period of democratic transformations” (Rattansi 1994: 21), what is critically underlined in the perception of modernity-as-order or as a project of order, is primarily its “other” side, which also directly relates modernity to concentration camps and slavery. As Tony Morrison expressed it, “modern life begins with slavery” (quoted in Gilroy 1993: 221). Bauman, writing about modernity with a focus on its “other side”, takes modernity to be a project of order and sums up the most important characteristics of this project in the following way. Firstly, all modernists have “assumed, whether explicitly or implicitly, the irreversible character of the changes modernity signified or brought in its wake … but they hardly ever questioned the superiority of modernity in the sense of subordinating, marginalizing, evicting or annihilating its pre-modern alternatives”. “Secondly all … visions conceived modernity in processual terms: as essentially an unfinished project”. And thirdly, “all visions were inside views of modernity … nothing visible beyond it, nothing which could relativize or objectivize the phenomenon itself…. In a sense, modernity was… self-referential and self-validating” (Bauman 1987: 115–116).

I want argue that this characterization of modernity as modernity-as-order is very relevant and extremely important in our context.

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