1. This course is a continuation of the course that covered 19th
and 20 century theories of modernity. The one dealing with the 19th century
I titled ‘Theorising Modernity’. This course
shall be dealing with a number of influential 20th century attempts to
characterize and diagnose the specificity of modern society. I shall follow
themes and perspectives from that earlier course as well as the new issues,
perspectives and challenges that emerge in the course of the new century.
Despite this, this course to be is relatively self-contained. Those of you who have
not done the earlier course are not at any substantial disadvantage and I will
leave my lectures for that course on my blog for your edification. In that
course I did take the first two lectures to outline my understanding of
modernity and indicate my approach. At the risk of boring some of you, I shall
briefly recapitulate the main elements of this before saying a few words about
the spirit and dynamics of modernity through the 20th century.
2.One way to think about this course is as an introduction to some of the classics of 20th century social philosophy. Why social philosophy? Hannah Arendt proposed a diagnosis of modernity that put the “rise of the social” at the very center of what modernity is. Put simply, this refers to the emergence of the economy as an independent system of relations from the domestic sphere focused on work, consumption and the status relations connected to it. Social philosophy in large part emerges in the 19th century in response to the massive social changes that accompanied the early development of this new sphere. The philosophers who championed this conceptual innovation recognised that the new economic and social relations signify a qualitative change and a dynamism that neither the old disciplines of political philosophy nor the new ones of political economy or economics were fully equipped to cope with. It is this recognition of a real crisis in the sense of the need for a more comprehensive or totalising approach that animates the original project of social philosophy. And it is this will to be comprehensive that connects social philosophy to the concept of modernity. As I indicated last semester and, as I will briefly reprise in a minute, the “modernity” that I’m interested in emerges from the confluence of a number of historical and social dynamics—political, economic, social, technological and cultural—that converge in the early decades of the 19th century but have continued to interact and develop in ever changing forms right up to our own time. Our main interest is the characterization of this novel societal constellation, the dynamics that animate it and the transformations it underwent from that time until the end of the 20th century. And obviously there have been not only very dramatic changes in the substance of these dynamics, also the attitude of contemporaries to these dynamics and their consequences have also changes dramatically. As an example of such changes I would offer the idea of the new locomotive as an image and metaphor for the emerging modernity of the 19th century. The locomotive is the product of the new technology and industrialization, it expresses the newly emerging mobility of the modern world; it travels on a track in a single direction and its course and its destination appears fixed and certain. If we try and think about a metaphor or representation of contemporary modernity, the locomotive not only seems technologically old hat. It seems too rigid, lacking in flexibility; the optimism and confidence expressed by this former technological marvel has now been replaced by ambivalence and anxiety about incipient unknown and unpredictable outcomes of technology. Contemporary popular culture has fine antennae for discerning and expressing these concerns. Think about the computer “Hal” that is smarter than us. A couple of years ago there was a Hollywood disaster movie titled Unstoppable that you might have seen. It concerned an enormous locomotive and accompanying train that somehow, unfortunately, I did not see the movie, was racing along a track without drivers and threatening to wreak havoc on anything standing in its way. I think this movie and many others that you might name clearly express a widespread anxiety about science, technology and its unforeseen consequences and dangers for human populations. In recent years there have been many such movies and this theme reaches a pinnacle in a move like The Road a couple of years ago, taken from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same title which you also might have seen, that depicts the journey of a father and young son as they try to escape from an unnamed apocalyptic disaster which has completely destroyed the world as they know it. Again here, the popular social imagination is preoccupied with the fate of a modern civilization that has got to the point of contemplating its own demise as a result of a range of unspecified scientific, military or environmental excesses. If I try to think of a metaphor to express the anxieties of our contemporary modernity, then perhaps the airports of Europe at the end of 2010 seem an appropriate corollary to the 19th century locomotive: thousands of people stuck in transport lounges, trying to sleep, not knowing when, or if, their plane was departing and how long they would be in transit waiting to get home. These images are cultural expressions of the dark side of modernity, of dangers, possibilities and of risks, of which we have increasingly become aware. You might also think that this concentration on the dark side of modernity and its potentials is a little morose. After all, what about all the good stuff! In this respect, I can only call on the support of another contemporary Italian social philosopher Giorgio Agamben who, in a recent essay entitled ‘What is Contemporary?’ argues that the individual who is too closely tied to their epoch are not contemporaries because they lack the distance to be able to see their epoch clearly. His point is that all times are obscure for those who live through them. Part of this obscurity is being blinded by the light of the present, whose brilliant familiarity makes it difficult for us to establish the required distance to see things distinctly in all their contours. Agamben maintains that the real contemporary is the individual who manages not to be blinded by the light of their own century but is able to glimpse the shadows and darkness. It is this historical asymmetry that Nietzsche called being “untimely”. This capacity to resist the light of the present is rare by definition and demands a sort of unconventionality, a courageous thinking. However, it is from this source that most of our keen insights into the dynamics of the contemporary world and the future has come, the ones that today we think of as paradigmatic.
3. However, it would be wrong to think that such a cultural awareness of crisis and attempts to give it cultural expression are only a recent phenomenon. This has also been a constant theme of modern social philosophy, which by its very concern to comprehend modernity as a whole, has inevitably also maintained a key diagnostic dimension. This stemmed from the recognition that modernity was a dynamic society that generated constant change and therefore also always provided new challenges. The thinkers that we will be concerned with in this course very much fit into this mould. It is hard to avoid the names Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno and Foucault when doing social philosophy or other related disciplines. Most of you would have heard of these names even if you don’t know anything about them. If for no other reason, it is worthwhile to know at least something about them. These thinkers are paradigmatic in the sense of offering categories, questions and frameworks that have had an enduring influence. Their theories cannot provide us with all the ingredients needed for a contemporary view but they do articulate some of the fundamental tensions in modern societies and ways of thinking them through from our perspective. You could say they serve as theoretical trampolines to assist our own thinking about modernity: they allows as to rise a little higher and see things more clearly, more distinctly that we otherwise might do.
4. But
one can think of a deeper and more existential rationale for such a course. The
geo-political world order, economic conditions, political and cultural
vocabularies have all changed rapidly in recent times. Technological change,
information revolutions, the multiple effects of globalisation and global
warming now transforms every aspect of our everyday life. World history happens
not just out there somewhere. Not only do we see it dramatically on the TV, it
also seems to impact directly on all of us in every aspect of our everyday
life. Heightened public concern about security or refugees, whether manipulated
or not for political purposes, is a measure of this. The idea that rapid change
adds to insecurity is a register of the fact that we are no longer as certain
as former generations about the world that surrounds, its stability and where changes
to it might be leading us. Modernity also has an enigmatic look. If you look at
it from the disadvantaged perspective of the Third World it has become the
bearer of universal aspirations to material abundance and autonomy, while our
own doubts and misgivings about it and the risks that come with it have also
grown. Most of what I will discuss in this course will not bear directly on
contemporary issues, but the theoretical developments I recount should indicate
how some of the key constituents of this contemporary enigma came into place.
Knowing something about the determinants and shape of this modern world even at
the abstract level of philosophical theory aids our practical orientation to
it. It provides perspective, a set of categories, some ways of thinking and
acting upon your experience.
5. One problem that immediately arises is the question of the status of knowledge about modern society. Here we are dealing not just with an independent and discreet natural object of knowledge but with a dynamic social reality that is always shifting and a collective modern experience that seems, ultimately, irreducibly idiosyncratic. As a consequence, the concept of modernity is inevitably a conceptual construct: there cannot be a single, definitive account of modernity. Because our experience of modernity is dynamic and perspectival, modernity is an inexhaustible theoretical object; no single version can ever claim the last word. Yet experience is not just idiosyncratic but also collective and shared. Many dimensions of our modern experience are common and inescapable. Some theories become significant because they strike a cord with many contemporaries. In this course we will be looking at four theories that are widely regarded as classical because they have struck a cord; they have been very influential in helping others to think their own experience of modernity. As I have said, these theories act as trampolines that assist others to think their own experience of modernity. These theorists fall into a category of philosophy that today we might call “orientative”. As mentioned there can be no positive knowledge of modernity in the sense of the “hard sciences”. This alternative approach attempts to diagnose the present, to suggest the human significance of some of the main dynamics of the past and the present (according to some usually implicit image). We could say that this orientative approach is interested in a crucial aspect of the philosophical task that I will call “vision”. What I mean by “vision” is nicely captured in an image I’ll take from Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who travelled widely in the US in the early 1830’s and wrote the famous book Democracy in America. At one point, in his travels he talks about leaving a town and walking down a road that climbed a nearby hill. At a certain point he turns around to view the town and sees it in a way he has never seen it before; he has an entirely new perspective and sees it in its totality and interconnections like never before. This is a metaphor for the philosophical vision being spoken about; it may be a vision that distorts much of the fine detail but it nevertheless, provides a perspective that is indispensable to orientation. I want to provide you with some key visions of modernity in the 20th century.
6. Let me offer a word of caution. This assistance gained from this “orientative’ approach is in most cases obtained under duress. My concern with these theories is with their explicit or even more often implicit account of modernity. Therefore we need to stress that this is our question and not necessarily always theirs. Weber was primarily concerned with the question of the uniqueness of the West; Foucault carried out a number of primarily historical studies of the relation between discourses, power and subjectivity. However, I would argue that all the thinkers in this course are explicitly ambitious and presuppose a vision of modern society that can be excavated from their other concerns. To wring from these theorists a theory of modernity does involve some interpretative violence. However, let me say in my own defense that philosophers are always perpetrating such violence on their predecessors and contemporaries. The first hermeneutic task of philosophical interpretation is to understand the philosopher the way they understood themselves. Even if this is only an ideal that cannot be achieved perfectly, it remains an important regulative idea and after all we do have their texts so we can’t just attribute any view to them. However, at the same time, it must be acknowledged that philosophy is always written from a contemporary perspective and interest; and this also conditions what we find interesting in these classical texts. We inevitably approach these texts with our questions.
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