Modernity and Postmodernity : Knowledge, Power and the Self

383 Pages·2000·15.618 MB·English

by  Gerard Delanty

Modernity and Postmodernity

Modernity and Postmodernity
Knowledge, Power and the Self
Gerard Delanty

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SAGE Publications
London · Thousand Oaks · New Delhi
© Gerard Delanty 2000
First published 2000
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Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism
everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and law-giving
through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they
then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which
reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of
free and open examination.
Immanuel Kant, Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason (1929 [1781], p. 9)
Besides it is not difficult to see that our time is a birth-time and a
period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it
has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in
the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed
never at rest but always engaged in moving forward. But just as the
first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks
the gradualness of merely quantitative growth - there is a qualitative
leap and the child is born - so likewise with the Spirit in its formation
matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the
structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at
by isolated symptoms. The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the
established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these
are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left
unaltered the face of the whole is cut by a sunburst which, in one flash,
illuminates the features of the new world.
G.W.F. Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind (1977 [1807], pp. 6-7)
Science today is a 'vocation' organized in special disciplines in the
service of self-clarification and knowledge of related facts. It is not
the gift of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations,
not does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers
about the meaning of the universe. This, to be sure, is the inescapable
condition of our historical situation.
Max Weber, 'Science as a Vocation' (1948a [1917], pp. 152-3)
The contemporary philosopher meets Freud on the same ground as

Nietzsche and Marx. All three rise before him as protagonists of
suspicion who rip away masks and pose the novel problem of the lie of
consciousness and unconsciouness.
Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (1974 [1969], p. 99)
No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun. There has
never been a modern world. The use of the present perfect tense is
important here, for it is a matter of a retrospective sentiment, of a
reading of our history. I am not saying we are entering a new era; on
the contrary we no longer have to continue the headlong flight of the
post-post-modernists; we are no longer obliged to cling to the avant-
garde of the avant-garde; we no longer seek to be cleverer, even more
critical, even deeper into the era 'era of suspicion'. No, instead we
discover that we have never begun to enter the modern era. Hence the
hint of the ludicrous that always accompanies postmodern thinkers,
they claim to come after a time that has not even started!
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1993 [1991], p. 47)
On double truth and the right distance. How to avoid seeming
complicitous with the object analyzed (notably in the eyes of those who
are foreign to it) or, conversely, reductive and hostile (especially to
those who are caught up in the object and who are inclined to refuse
the very principle of objectivation)? How to reconcile the objectivation
of belief (religious, literary, artistic, scientific, etc.) and of its social
conditions of production, and the sensible and faithful evocation of the
experience of belief that is inherent to being inserted and involved in a
social game? Only at the cost of a very long and very difficult work -
and one that is the more invisible the more successful it is - to put
oneself at a distance from the object and then to surmount this very
distance, a work that bears inseparably on the object and on the
relationship to the object, thus on the subject of the scientific work.
Pierre Bourdieu, 'Scattered Remarks' (1999, p. 334)
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: Knowledge, Power and the Self 1
1 The Discourses of Modernity: Enlightenment, Modernism
and Fin-de-Siècle Sociology 8
The Emergence of Modernity 8
Towards Modernism 14
The Fin-de-Siècle Critiques of Modernity 21
Conclusion: Contested Modernities 31
2 Modernity and Secularization: Religion and the Postmodern
Challenge 32
Blumenberg and Modernity 34
Modernity and Tradition 42
Postmodernism and Negative Theology 46
Conclusion: Posttraditionalism in Question 50
3 The Pathogenesis of Modernity: The Limits of the
Enlightenment 52
Horkheimer and Adorno: Enlightenment as Mass Deception 53
Koselleck: Critique and Crisis 56
Toulmin: M odernity's Hidden Agenda 60
Voeglin: Modernity as Gnosticism 64
Arendt: The Loss of the Political 66
Conclusion: Developmental Logics 70
4 The Impossibility of Modernity: Cultural Crystallization
and the Problem of Contingency 72
Posthistory and Cultural Crystallization 73
Leo Strauss: Modernity as a Loss of Certainty 76
Luhmann: A Self-Limiting Modernity 81
Conclusion: Contingency and Communication 86
vin MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY
5 Rescuing Modernity: The Recovery of the Social 88
Habermas: From History to Discourse 89
Lefebvre and Heller on Everyday Life 100
Castoriadis and Touraine on Modernity and Postmodemity 107
Conclusion: Discursive Space 113
6 Postmodernism and the Possibility of Community 114
What is Community? 115
The Contemporary Rediscovery of Community 119
Beyond Communitarianism: The Postmodernization of
Community 122
Community as a Cultural Imaginary 127
Conclusion: Towards a Reflexive Community 130
7 From Modernity to Postmodemity: Post-dialectics and the
Aestheticization of the Social 131
Postmodern Aesthetics 133
Postmodernism as Deconstructive Theory 137
Postmodernization 141
Postmodern Politics 146
Conclusion: Postmodemity beyond the West 153
8 Further Reflections: Constructivism beyond Postmodemity 156
Notes 168
References 173
Index 192
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book can be read as a response to two kinds of transition in modern
society. The first concerns cultural changes in the worldview of society,
that is, changes on the level of the prevailing model of knowledge and,
more broadly, changes in the cultural self-image of the age, the models
by which a society interprets itself. The second kind of transition con-
cerns changes in the social, economic and political structures of modern
society. The issues that these questions raise directly relate to the debate
on modernity and postmodernity, which has been one of the central
controversies in social and political theory for almost two decades. It is a
striking feature of social and political thought over the last two decades
that these two dimensions of transition coincide in certain respects. On
the one side, the older and Marxist-influenced debate on the transition
from feudalism, and somewhat later from mercantilism, to capitalism
from the sixteenth century onward has now been seen to be part of
the more general transition from tradition to modernity, whereby the
transition could also be theorized in terms of a conflict between capitalism
and democracy, or, as more recent formulations would put it, as a
struggle between an instrumental rationality of domination and a cul-
tural critique animated by a communicative rationality deriving from
civil society. In this debate, the idea of modernity suggests more than
merely capitalism - or, in other formulations, industrialism - and there-
fore the direction in which the transition may be leading is at best an
open agenda, s ince the struggle between power and culture, capitalism
and democracy, cannot be so easily concluded. Indeed, the normative
critique of capitalism can no longer be conducted from the vantage point
of democracy. It is not surprising, then, that one of the conclusions to this
debate has been a recognition, at some level, that the idea of a cultural
and societal transition must be theorized as an opening within modernity
itself of alternative logics of development, ranging from hidden histories,
civil society, social movements, to Soviet statism. Thus with the shift to
modernity as a frame of reference the idea of a further transition from
capitalism to socialism becomes just one developmental logic. Whether it
was because this debate congealed in the seemingly permanent structures
of the Cold War or because no movement emerged dominant or because