c venne; m featherstone modernity

Copyright © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society (http://tcs.sagepub.com) (SAGE Publications,
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 23(2–3): 457–476. DOI: 10.1177/0263276406064829

Modernity

Couze Venn and Mike Featherstone

Abstract Whilst presenting a number of features that have been put forward to char-
acterize modernity as a way of life and a social system, this entry suggests a dissident
genealogy that reveals a hidden history of continuities and alternatives. It thereby prob-
lematizes the norms about periodization and the assumptions about the elaboration of
a logos that underlie the concept of the modern. This approach to modernity as a
complex of processes, institutions, subjectivities, and technologies challenges the more
familiar history of linear temporalities and progressive transformations. The fruitfulness
of seeing modernity, as much as other historical periods, as hybrid assemblages in a state
of flux is that it draws attention to the heterogeneity and processual nature of cultures
and feeds into the possibility of the critique of the present.

Keywords capitalism, dissident genealogy, modernism, public sphere, religion, techno-
cratic reason, tradition

atour’s (1993) claim that we have never been modern is particularly provocative for
those who are comforted by the progressive value attached to modernity, and for those
who take it for granted that we know what modernity is. His intervention came after a

period of often irate polemics around the loose concept of the postmodern that had started
to appear from the 1960s, especially with regard to the changing relation of the arts to the
project of the ‘emancipation of humanity’, and in relation to the perception of a crisis of legit-
imation, forcefully signalled in the work of Habermas and Lyotard from the late 1970s. His
emphasis on modernity as a hybrid assemblage – constituted in, and constitutive of, ‘social
needs and natural reality, meanings and mechanisms, signs and things’ (1993: 35) – that a
certain discourse of modernity disassociates and makes invisible, calls up the contrasting prob-
lematization initiated by Foucault in The Order of Things. That pivotal work in the contem-
porary understanding of modernity identified a new, if enigmatic, object of knowledge, ‘Man’,
as the central figure constituted through the dynamic but unstable intersection of three new
fields of enquiry and domains of practice, namely, language, life, labour. Whilst Latour argued
against the purification of an episteme as a discursive strategy in the constitution of modernity
as different from preceding epochs, Foucault claims that modernity is announced in the shift
from the system of representation that pertains to the classical age towards the new logos,
centered on the epistemic subject, inscribed in the human sciences. It should be noted,
however, that Foucault is careful to temper the claim of epistemic break with the proviso of
conditions of possibility and thus the possibility that ‘man’ may well be erased ‘like a face
drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (1966: 398). The point of highlighting the problematic
status of modernity is to put into context the new form of purification at work today which
is seeking to bring about through a renewed modernization the age of the market and of the
economic subject as its calculating agent. Much is at stake, therefore, concerning a critique of
the present, in one’s interpretation of modernity as a period.

Though explicitly or implicitly present in a great deal of the literature in the arts and phil-

osophy from the 19th century, the concept of modernity has not always enjoyed the current
prominence in the conceptual landscape of the social sciences. In the postwar era, up until the

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458 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

mid 1970s in sociology, it was capitalism which was the dominant term. The influential Intro-
duction to the History of Sociology (Barnes, 1966) has no place for modernity in the index,
although it had a large number of references to capitalism. Anthony Giddens’ (1973) key early
work Capitalism and Modern Social Theory clearly indicates the emphasis by foregrounding
capitalism, which is prominent in the index, whereas there is no place for modern or modernity.
Yet by the early 1990s the focus for Giddens was more directly on spelling out the contours
of modernity in books with titles such as The Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and
Identity. In cultural studies, it may well be possible to chart a similar shift with Stuart Hall
and his associates producing the influential Open University volume Formation of Modernity
in 1992. When terminology shifts it is possible to see this renaming process as a strategic move
in the field of academic and intellectual cultural production (Bourdieu). Our task is to examine
what is at stake in such shifts.

Our approach is to bring into view a longer and more diffracted history of the modern, so

that the break with classical antiquity from the 16th century and the quarrel of the ancients
and the moderns in the 17th century appear as part of the landscape. A literature has emerged
that regards developments in the European Renaissance as announcing an early modernity, and
here one could refer to Dante, da Vinci, Luther, Cervantes, Augustine’s reflections on time,
memory and the self, Arabic science and medicine, the Copernican revolution, the emergence
of the New World as significant markers of the shifts in the imagination and the gaze that
prepare the ground for the later reorganization of knowledge that one associates with
modernity. Foucault strikingly began his study of these shifts with Velasquez’s painting ‘Las
Meninas’ (1656) to bring to light the re-centring and de-centring of the gaze that fractures
the ideal of classical representation, and betrays the lack at the heart of its episteme. The more
familiar meaning of the term began to appear from the 18th century when the verb ‘to modern-
ize’ first appears in the English language, introduced to denote alterations to buildings, language
and fashions. From the mid-19th century in Europe the modern acquires the connotation of
improvement and efficiency that persists in the common usage, a meaning that has acquired
the force of dogma in the current largely neoliberal strategy of an injunction to ‘modernize’
or disappear.

A different line of interrogation of modernity, and a different periodization, is indicated by

Todorov (1992[1982]), who identifies 1492 as the birthmark of modernity, arguing that the
linking of knowledge with dispossession and subjugation triggered by the colonization of the
Americas must be seen as a central feature of modern reason. Serres (1982) similarly noted
the association of reason with subjugating power that follows when the reason/reasoning of
the mightiest comes to be always identified with the ‘best reason’. Thus, from the beginning,
the tensions in the modern reorganization of knowledge are bound up, on the one hand, with
the effects of power and with the form of economy and governmentality emerging at the time;
on the other hand, they attest to the alternative visions and trajectories side-lined when
modernity acquires the force of a project of worlding a world according to a singular vision
and temporalization of history.

Alongside these developments one finds certain themes that echo with the ambivalences

and paradoxes signalled in Latour’s claim and in the debates about the postmodern, specifi-
cally, regarding the claim that the modern effects a break with tradition or community, as in
Tonnies’ dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, the notion of disenchantment that
Weber detects in the privilege of instrumental rationality, and the idea of alienation and
evanescence expressed in Marx, and explored in different registers from Baudelaire to
Benjamin and Marshall Berman (1983). They are themes that surface in different forms in the
history of modernity, expressing the enigmatic quality that, following Buci-Glucksmann
(1994), one could refer to as ‘baroque reason’, that is, a reason that opens up the hetero-
geneous and inassimilable zone where the affinity between thought and affect and ‘the infinite
materiality of bodies and images’ (1994: 139) are played out in visions of the uncanny, the
horrifying, the ‘strange beauty’ and ‘swift joys’ explored in the modern aesthetics (Venn,
2000). At the worst of times, such as in the wake of Fascism, the violence latent in these

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Problematizing Global Knowledge – Modernity 459

themes has been embodied in the destructive figure of the ‘angel of progress’ as depicted in
Benjamin’s vision of modernity as the ceaseless production of the new on the ruins of the old.
It is important to note that in the post-Enlightenment period these ambivalences and mis-
givings about the modern have been amply elaborated or refigured in dissident works and
thoughts in movements like Romanticism (see Bowie, 1990) and in conceptualizations of life
and the living – in Leibnizian science as well as in early vitalist discourse – at odds with Mech-
anism and Newtonian natural philosophy that were becoming hegemonic from the 18th
century. Of course works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Goethe’s Faust were them-
selves exemplarily modern. One should add to this problematization the effects of opposi-
tional politics in Europe and the colonies that drew on the emancipatory and critical elements
within Enlightenment discourse in support of resistance to the advances of capitalism and
emergent imperial governmentality. They reveal a genealogy of counter and alternative moder-
nities, of ‘the insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, 1984: 42) that we shall address
below, focusing on a number of features that have come to be thought central to modernity.

A persistent feature of the discourse of modernity is the fact that in its emergence it has

instigated a dichotomy between modern and traditional societies, that is, between processes
of legitimation and the inscription of meaning based in rational calculations and institutions,
in legal contract and individual volition as opposed to custom, religion and communal forms
of wealth. Whilst clearly modernity has seen the emergence of state and non-state institutions
that have not existed before, and whilst one can understand the logic of difference at work in
this discursive constitution of modernity, analyses of modern culture too often forget the
reality of the vestiges and mutations of older values, beliefs and ways of being, for instance
regarding feudalism, monarchism, and ‘traditional’ forms of sovereignty and power that co-
exist with secular state institutions. For example, for a long time in Europe and in many colon-
ized states, family law remained the prerogative of the church or religion and ‘tradition’. In
any case, the values that secular law inscribes often have a foundation in religious and
traditional belief systems. Indeed a dissident genealogy of modernity would restore, amongst
other things, the central place that non-conformist beliefs like Unitarianism and Deism
continued to have in shaping the transformations in society that have made the world as
modern – in education, in legislation, in the opposition to slavery, in the history of socialism
and even the development of the Enlightenment. In its making of difference, the discourse of
modernity has reconstructed a view of preceding periods and a sense of its own coherence
that simply does not accord with the historical reality. The operation of this systemic discur-
sive distortion has been equally at work in the understanding of concepts of civilization, of
nation, of the Orient and the ‘Other’, and of science itself.

Conventionally, in the social sciences, a series of terms like secularism, democracy, tech-

nology, the nation-state, citizenship, industrialization, urbanization comes to mind to qualify
what one means by modernity. One may even add to that list ideas of the epistemological
superiority of science, the autonomy of reason and the law, the existence of a public sphere,
human rights, a number of fundamental freedoms, individual ownership of property and indi-
vidualism. But as soon as one starts to make such a check-list of the characteristics or the
criteria that one would use to distinguish a modern society from a non-modern one, or to
categorize modernity as a period, one begins to encounter difficulties. Not only is it the case
that many states that take their modernity for granted do not display many of the key features
that social theory ascribes to modernity; the point is that all these terms are open to prob-
lematization. In fact if one were to imagine the ideal-type of modern state, almost no existing
state qualifies. For instance the political institutions of the USA may in principle be secular,
but religion, although technically a separate sphere from the state, continues to occupy a
central place both symbolically and at the level of legitimation. Indeed, appeal to a transcen-
dent domain in the institution of modernity and in the authorization of everyday practices in
conditions of modernity is deeply ingrained. The effect of the neglect of belief systems in the
history of modernity is yet to be properly established; it will completely alter our view of
modern cultures. Similarly, arguments that point to the emergence of a ‘society of control’

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and ‘Empire’ undermine faith in the existence of democracy even in the so-called ‘advanced’
states. Latour’s claim in a sense draws attention to counter-discourses that open the way for
a questioning not only of modernity as a period, but of the system of classification and peri-
odization that have been taken as paradigmatic for a considerable time.

The notion of a break with ‘tradition’ and with the old, central to the modern imaginary,

has its exemplary instantiation in Descartes’ gesture of tabula rasa, that is, of brushing aside
from the table of knowledge the authority of ancient texts; it is the gesture whereby the clean
slate of reason and evidence is made to replace appeal to an ultimately transcendent author-
ity. Older knowledges may be readmitted but subject to the critical and sceptical judgement
of a rational method, uncluttered by faith and dogmas. This gesture also installs the epistemic
subject in the place of the logos or principle guaranteeing rational thought, and so inaugurates
a privilege of cognitivism, and the ‘forgetting’ of metaphysics that remain symptomatic well
into so-called postmodern times. One encounters it today in the models of artificial intelli-
gence that assume a unitary, autonomous, rational, self-sufficient mind or brain. This assump-
tion about a singular author of truth runs counter to the collaborative and inter-subjective
reality of the process of production and validation of knowledge, then and now, as the social
studies of science have established; it is to be hoped that new information technologies like
the Internet and digitalization will undermine such assumptions, though they too will have to
change, for the hold of logocentrism runs deep in the conceptual and technical apparatus of
modernity and postmodernity.

Another instance of a construction by the social sciences that casts into invisibility features

central to the institution of modern societies concerns the question of the emergence of a public
sphere which, since the early studies by Habermas (1983 [1980]), has been thought intrinsic
to modernity. The argument is that in democratic societies new public spaces have emerged for
the formation of public opinion about matters concerning the good order of the state; they
facilitate the free exchange of information and rational debate, and thus help to constitute an
informed public capable of making rational choices about issues relating to group and national
interests. Yet the dichotomous framing of modernity has meant that liberal as well as many
radical accounts of this element of the democratic polity have tended to neglect the role both
of traditional sites – the marketplace, the church – and dissident forums located in local or
communal settings. The history of resistance demonstrates the extent to which mechanisms
were invented that served the goals of dissident publics in the modern period. This includes a
large number of societies and associations, such as syndicalist organizations or ‘combinations’,
mutual help associations, salons and societies like the Lunar Society, as well as non-conformist
sects, such as the Quakers, or the Unitarian Church. Such new elements of the public spheres
emerging in response to bourgeois institutions and spaces, and thus themselves belonging to
modernity, nevertheless relied on values and socialities that reconstituted older social relations
and ways of being or constituted new publics that one should describe as hybrid.

Thus, Linebaugh and Rediker (2000) show the extent to which sailors, slaves, and common-

ers constituted a kind of ‘many-headed hydra’ forging new alliances and fomenting rebellion.
This process is even clearer when one considers the history of slave and colonial resistance.
For instance, Genovese (1974) shows the importance of ambulant preachers and religious gath-
erings, the role of the Book alongside mutations in music and songs and ways of storytelling
in forming opinion and coordinating action that sustained rebellion (something Toni Morrison
has dramatized and analysed in her writings). Similarly, the Subaltern Studies Group has shown
the extent to which new emergent forms of organization and knowledges and older ‘traditional’
institutions and sites combined to determine the form and modalities of resistance to subju-
gation in India, for instance about the Santal, Basarat, and Sepoy uprisings, or jute workers
organization (studies by Guha, Pandey, and Chakrabarty in Guha and Spivak, 1988). Whilst
print technology was important in these activities, the interesting issue is both the emergence
of non-bourgeois publics and spheres and the process of circulation of ideas through the
network of dissident groups that has tended to remain mostly invisible in accounts of
modernity. Whilst it can be argued that these forms of resistance are modern, it is also the

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case that continuities existed, say about religious sites and the role of religious ideas, which
the conventional account of modernity neglects because of the dichotomies inscribed in its
systems of classification.

In opposition to the neat break which conventional social science descriptions assume, our

interrogation underlines the hybrid, cosmopolitan, heterogeneous or creolized character of the
institutions, organizations and subjectivities that construct the modern period in Europe and
elsewhere. For example, Viswanathan’s (1989) study of the introduction of English in India
in the 19th century to constitute a cadre of functionaries for the machinery of imperial govern-
mentality shows the importance of the discussions about the constitution of an appropriate
literary canon and the place of religion in the curriculum that had effects for the moderniza-
tion process in both the colonies and in England. A more pertinent case for the reconstruc-
tion of knowledge today is that of the formation of a cosmopolitan corps of intellectuals and
artists spread across the continents who were involved in exchanges and networks and collab-
orations that increasingly determined the content and destiny of movements like modernism
and socialism. For instance, the ‘1922 Generation’ of D’Andrate and others in Brazil, the
Harlem Renaissance movement in the USA involving poets, novelists, musicians, activists,
modernism in India, China, Japan from the 1920s were not only central in the transformation
of the culture and landscape outside Europe, but had effects on artists and intellectuals in the
‘metropolitan’ centres of empire, in terms of subject matter and influence – indicatively: jazz,
African art and cubism, a novel like Forster’s A Passage to India. The history of modernism
would have been utterly different without these diasporic fusions, which have since become
commonplace, if ignored in conventional accounts of modernity. At the level of politics, one
can note the emergence, from the late 19th century but particularly after the First World War,
of political parties and movements for decolonizations and vernacular alternative modernities
in China, India, Latin America, Africa, Japan, Turkey that have altered the landscape of
modernity worldwide.

This standpoint about the hybrid or composite character of much of what one recognizes

as modern is in keeping with the recognition of several conjoined processes: the slow and
uneven pace of change of social institutions as understood within the framework of the longue
durée; the heterogeneous character of all cultures, resulting from the borrowings, admixtures,
grafts, cross-cultural exchanges of all kinds that work in pragmatic ways rather than accord-
ing to the rationalist re-descriptions generated by the discourse of modern governance; the
relative stability of the mechanisms, values, beliefs and sensibilities that participate in the
formation of subjectivities and of inter-subjective worlds. Such worlds, constitutive of social-
ities, operate alongside as well as outside institutions subject to more direct state regulatory
and disciplinary devices; indeed the latter often rely on the existence of the former for their
own mechanisms of control to have a purchase. The point is to draw attention to the multi-
plicity, specificity and mobility of the assemblages that sustain real communities and ways of
life, put into place or emerging as part of the practices of everyday life, and thus ubiquitous
even if more visible in communities associated with small-scale farming or mining. Equally,
they provide spaces and resources for alternative socialities and for resistance to hegemonic
forces (Escobar and Alvarez, 1992). Interestingly, neo-liberal interventions in the domain of
the social threaten to homogenize such mechanisms in their effort to make them amenable to
economic calculations and governance, and thus open to the forces of domestication.

So, underneath the paradoxes of modernity lies a history that a dominant view of modernity,

promoted or encouraged by the social sciences, has managed to make invisible. Critiques
developed from the standpoint of feminist and postcolonial theory, and interrogations pursued
in the social studies of the technosciences or instigated in the light of deconstruction, have
challenged the ‘history of the victors’ as well as the authorized framing of knowledge within
the occidentalist purview of modernity. And here one needs to bear in mind, as Foucault has
argued, that critique itself and its apparatus, especially in the sense of ‘the permanent critique
of our era’ that ‘simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical
mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject’, is part of the

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‘philosophical ethos’ of modernity (1984: 42). The co-articulation of capitalism, the European
form of colonialism and technocratic and phallogocentric reason in the elaboration of
modernity has over-determined the privilege of instrumental rationality and the narrative of
progress-as-domination and increasing efficiency; it has encouraged the counter-emancipatory
tendencies latent in the discourse of modernity and hastened the postmodern ‘end of history’
and its fundamentalist dangers.

The Postmodern

The prefix ‘post’ points to something after the modern, albeit with a certain hesitancy and
sense of semantic inadequacy, suggesting something emergent and derivative, yet to be clearly
delineated and formulated as a positive term in its own right. The postmodern, like its affili-
ate terms postmodernism, postmodernity and postmodernization, takes its impetus from
modernity. The modern can be seen as the generic term which generates the set. Adding the
term ‘post’ to the modern suggests some failure of the modern. This ‘postmodern condition’
means the loss of confidence in metanarratives, the ‘big stories’ of progress, science, human
rights and citizenship which came out of the Western Enlightenment of the 18th century and
posited both a linear direction to history and an expanding horizon of possibilities (Lyotard,
1984). The modern, as we noted, identifies itself with its differentiation from its own past:
to be modern is to continually anticipate or produce the new and different. The postmodern
challenged this modern capacity and suggested the end of the new and of originality: the end
of art, the end of the subject, the end of history.

The family of terms deriving from the postmodern gained its impetus from the popularity

of the term ‘postmodernism’ in the 1960s, seen as a reaction to artistic modernism. In the
United States in particular, young writers, artists and critics such as Burroughs, Barthelme,
Rauschenberg, Cage, Fiedler, Hassan and Sontag portrayed modernism as exhausted, as insti-
tutionalized into high culture in the museum and academy. Postmodernism pointed to the
collapse of the hierarchical distinction between high and mass culture, the mixing of codes
and stylistic eclecticism, the loss of the distinction between art and everyday life and the end
of the originality of the artist, for instance in the debates about Warhol and Pop Art. This
entailed a positive attitude towards everyday consumer culture and a rejection of the central
(high) cultural values of modernity. It was this challenging critical aspect, with its suspicion of
totalizing reason and value hierarchies, which proved attractive to some intellectuals and
academics. In the 1970s and 1980s a number of high profile debates ensued, as the term was
batted back and forth between Europe and the United States and a range of major figures
were involved or invoked such as Bell, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas,
Jameson, Lyotard and Vattimo. As the term postmodern was seized upon by critics and
commentators and used in a variety of imprecise ways, the more dramatic epochal associations
came to the fore, linked to French poststructuralist theorists such as Deleuze and Foucault
(later Baudrillard), despite regular denials. The dramatic contrast was made between Foucault’s
provocative remark at the end of The Order of Things about the possible disappearance of
‘man’ and Habermas’s assertion that modernity was an unfinished project.

Other themes are opened up here, particularly in relation to temporality/historicality, as

for example in Jameson’s work, and to a critique of technics. Jameson’s (1991) intervention
in the debate arises from the widespread concern about the effects of developments that were
beginning to become definite: the ‘legitimation crisis’ to which Habermas and others had drawn
attention, the emergence of the ‘society of the spectacle’ (Debord, 1977), shifts in the relation
of culture and the economy that were thought in terms of consumer culture (Featherstone,
1991); the transformations in science and technology, not just in the wake of cybernetics, but
in relation to an uncoupling of science from critique and from a certain mode of questioning
that had nourished the Enlightenment idea of modernity as a project. It is implicated for
example in his reference to the erosion of the distinction between high and mass culture and
the radicalizing role that the avant-garde was supposed to have. He targets problems of
pastiche, of the fragmentation of experience and subjectivity, the flattening of time and the

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erasure of history, and the self-referentiality of mass culture. These have become familiar issues
in the debate about postmodernism. However, his analytical apparatus relies on his ideas of a
political unconscious and the logic of consumer capitalism, ideas that are fraught with assump-
tions and misunderstandings about so-called ‘post-structuralist’ critiques, though they provide
a purchase for the analysis of the culture of modernity.

It is important to contrast the stakes in this debate with the vibrant and hopeful output of

modernist work coming out of postcolonizing countries after the Second World War. It would
require several books to redress this balance, for artists, writers, architects in the ‘Third World’
were busy producing works that engaged with the project of decolonization and the experi-
ence of colonialism, and that forged the imagination of hybrid, diasporic worlds. Because of
their subject matter, their attachments to vernacular cultural forms and their political commit-
ments, they do not easily fit into the categories of ‘avant-garde’ though technically they belong
to modernism; besides, the critiques levelled at the culture industry or the dichotomy of high
versus popular culture do not apply to the same extent. An indicative list of this output would
note, for example, The Progressive Artists Group in India, writers and artists like Achebe,
Soyinka, Empahlele, wa’Thiongo, Okeke in Africa, Brazilia as icon of modernity in Latin
America, alongside artists and writers like Wilfredo Lam, Neruda, Marquez, Allende, Kahlo.
This output, whilst being modern and contributing to the culture and history of modernity, is
not burdened by the obsessions of modish Euro-American postmodernism. Today the contrast
in meaning and concern is exemplified in the difference between the work of, say, Damien
Hirst and a Palestinian artist like Khaled Hourani; it is repeated in the kind of corpus of work
represented in the Documenta series of exhibitions (Enwesor et al., 2003) and artistic activi-
ties discussed in many journals, e.g. Small Axe. Other elements of a ‘minoritarian’
(post)modernity come into view here; they are an integral aspect of the dissident genealogy
of modernity that we are outlining.

Curiously, one starting point for theorizing this alternative account is Lyotard’s

(1984[1979]) much cited and misunderstood analysis of the postmodern condition. Although
the impact of this text has focused on the question of the postmodern, the underlying issue,
as the subtitle, ‘Report on Knowledge’, indicates, is about foundation, namely of truth, of the
good society or the ethical community, of living well, of their inter-relationships and their
grounding. It is also about the impossibility of foundation, its slippery character, and its secret
or veiled existence. Truth, the good society, ethics refer to a transcendent domain; they operate
according to the logic of the promise, a ‘to-come’ that asks that one trust in a virtual or
ungrounded ground. Premodern societies took this world for granted, in which the virtual and
the actual interpenetrated in a magical or miraculous domain, inhabited by spirits and intan-
gibles entities. The grand narratives circumscribing the spatio-temporal field of this imaginary
in which the ‘to-come’ and the ‘having-been’ encompass ‘the totality of life within the same
unity of time’ (Lyotard, 1988) work according to the mythical organization of time, whereby
the beginning and the end refer to each other. Modernity invents linearity, and thus inscribes
the repetitive erasure of preceding moments. This gesture of tabula rasa must be ceaselessly
re-enacted, and its costs worked through. For Lyotard, it recalls the repetition-compulsion that
drives the search for the lost object of desire. A forgetting of foundation ensues, and thus its
dissimulation into an absent-present metaphysics – the trace of which Nietzsche, Heidegger
and Derrida have deconstructed in their different ways. There is also the temptation to refigure
the desire for an emancipation into a technique or an art of bringing forth, a techne. Lyotard
(1988) discusses this avenue in order to make visible the relation to an ethics and an aesthet-
ics, as well as to argue for the work of anamnesis that needs to be part of the process of (a
problematic and interminable) emancipation. It is in that context that he says:

Postmodernity is not a new age, it is the rewriting of some features to which modernity
has laid claim, and to begin with, of its claim to found its legitimacy on a project of the
emancipation of the whole of humanity by means of science and technics. But this re-
writing, as I said, has been at work for a long time already within modernity itself. (Lyotard,
1988: 202)

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The implication about the work of memory that is called for to avoid compulsion-

repetition is also for Lyotard a way of resisting the erasing of duration immanent in the over-
writing and overcoding of modernity in the self-referential imaginary of new communication
technologies. It is important to point out that this analysis of foundation is consistent with the
arguments about the elimination of the emancipatory goals of the Enlightenment, inscribed in
the idea of modernity as a project, brought about by the prioritizing of the criteria of techni-
cal efficiency and of productivity. This shift, as we noted earlier, is consistent with the privi-
lege of ‘purposive-rational’ (Habermas) or technocratic rationality over ethical and aesthetic
considerations that thinkers of the Frankfurt School as well as Habermas have underlined in
their critique of post-Enlightenment reason and capitalism.

The thrust of the entry has been to problematize modernity as a period. A number of final

reflections will enable us to point towards more fruitful grounds for the critique of founding
principles and the context of globalization and its problems. They relate to the need to rethink
the relation between life/the living, technology, socialities and projects of becoming that pursue
the emancipatory ideals that had motivated the radical side of Enlightenment and modernity.
Stiegler (1998), in his analysis of the relation of technics to time in the history of being, points
to the arguments about the separation of tekhne and episteme that appeared in the history of
Western philosophy. This distinction was not made in Homeric times, and we should add, in
philosophies from South Asia and Egypt that fed into ancient Greek thought. This separation,
he argues, arose as part of the instrumentalization of logos that readied it as an instrument of
power, through rhetoric; it led to the renunciation of knowledge. Technics thereby became the
unthought in the theorization of being, a forgetting with profound consequences if one thinks
of the history of being as ‘nothing but its inscription in technicity’ (Stiegler, 1998: 4). Stiegler’s
exploration notes the complex genealogy of this splitting of knowledge, passing through
Lamarck’s distinction between organic and inorganic life and the effects of industrialization in
the technicization of science, the instrumentalizing effects of which Habermas highlighted, as
we saw. For Stiegler, the overthrowing of the order of knowledge and of social organization as
a consequence of 19th-century industrialization meant that,

. . . philosophical reflection was now faced with such a widespread technical expansion that
all forms of knowledge were mobilized by, and brought closer to, the field of instrumen-
tality, to which science, with its ends determined by the imperatives of the economy and
war, and its epistemic status shifting accordingly, became more and more subject. (Stiegler,
1998: 2)

We have noted the extent to which capitalism and the European form of colonialism were

determining in this shift; their critique remains central. But Stiegler highlights an aspect of
the privilege of instrumental rationality and goals that open up an additional avenue for a
critique of modernity as a period, namely, the argument that ‘the technicization of science
constitutes its eidetic blinding [and] the ensuing displacement of meaning leads to an elabo-
ration of method that is metaphysical’ (1998: 3). Furthermore, technicization, Stiegler tells
us, produces loss of memory whilst calculation comes to determine the essence of modernity.
The process of technicization through calculation,

. . . drives Western knowledge down a path that leads to a forgetting of its origin, which is
also a forgetting of its truth. This is the ‘crisis of the European sciences’. Without a refoun-
dation of rational philosophy, science . . . leads, it is argued, to the technicization of the
world. (Stiegler, 1998: 3)

This interrogation of modernity, focusing on the questioning of technics and technical being,

is part of the longer genealogy that we have tried to signal by returning to a number of moments
in the mutations and departures that have renewed the critique of the present and still today
provide resources for the struggle against ‘the return of the worst’ that Derrida (Derrida and
Stiegler, 2002) argued was motivation for his commitment to the liberatory and critical ideals
of the Enlightenment. It puts on the agenda the problem of rethinking the history of being in

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Problematizing Global Knowledge – Modernity 465

terms of the diverse histories, in different cultures and periods, of the constitutive interrela-
tionship between foundational narratives, technology, and the goals of society, that is, the inter-
relationships of metaphysics and religion, ethics, and projects of emancipation such as
modernity. The analysis of this complex history of modernity encompasses spatialities and
temporalities that stretch well beyond the European and Western purview of the becoming of
being. The context of ‘global knowledge’ and its dangers is the backdrop against which we
argue for dissident genealogies of this history.

References

Barnes, H.E. (ed.) (1966) Introduction to the History of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Berman, M. (1983) All That Is Solid Melts into Air. London: Verso.
Bowie, A. (1990) Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche. Manchester: Manchester

University Press.

Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1994) Baroque Reason. The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. P. Camiller. London:

Sage.

Debord, G. (1977) The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black and Red.
Derrida, J. and B. Stiegler (2002) Echographies of Television, trans. J. Banorek. Cambridge: Polity.
Enwesor, O. et al. (eds) (2003) Creolite and Creolization (Documanta 11–3). Hatje-Cantz: Ostfildern-

Ruit.

Escobar, A. and S. Alvarez (1992) The Making of Social Movements in Latin America. Boulder: Westview

Press.

Featherstone, M. (1991) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage.
Foucault, M. (1966) Les mots et les choses. Paris: Editions Gallimard. [English version (1970) The Order

of Things. London: Tavistock]

Foucault, M. (1984) ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader.

Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Genovese, E. (1974) Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Random House.
Giddens, A. (1973a) Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Giddens, A. (1973b) The Class Structure of Advanced Societies. London: Hutchinson.
Guha, R. and G. Spivak (eds) (1988) Selected Subaltern Studies. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Habermas, J. (1983[1980]) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures, trans.

F. Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity.

Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Capitalism. London: Verso.
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Lyotard, J.-F. (1988) ‘Reecrire la modernite’, Cahiers de Philosophie 5: 193–203.
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Couze Venn is Professor of Cultural Theory, Nottingham Trent University. His latest book is
The Postcolonial Challenge (Sage, 2005).

Mike Featherstone is Editor of Theory, Culture & Society. His recent publications include
Automobilities (edited with N. Thrift and J. Urry, Sage, 2005) and Consumer Culture and
Postmodernism (second edition forthcoming from Sage, 2006).

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