Re: Modernity & Politics

At 11:23 AM -0400 27/5/03, Threehegemons@aol.com wrote:
> The most appealing thing about being modern, not emphasized
> nearly enough in the literature, is the promise of autonomy,
> particularly the right to not have your life-partner (or even
> one-night partner) chosen by some cabal of elders or by some
> fixed set of rules. This has been the theme of mass-appeal
> modernist texts going back at least to Clarissa and continuing
> in numerous popular films to the present, which present love
> triumphing over 'traditional' obstacles like religious or racial
> differences, and now even gender conventions. It is the promise
> of autonomy that has made the modern so alluring, and most of us
> who 'critique modernity' have no desire whatsoever to give up
> our own.
Is this not over-stating it? And under-playing the material appeal of 
the modern?

What you say is true enough for some. But not all non (or pre-) 
modern cultures/societies are as 'patriarchal' as portrayed in your 
description. There are many where there is considerable autonomy at 
least in the choice of life-partner, even considerable autonomy about 
when and how one works though perhaps not in what one works at. There 
is even a significant space for sexual autonomy for the woman, unless 
she gets pregnant _and_ no man steps forward to acknowledge paternity 
and/or she refuses to assign responsibility (but then, such autonomy 
in the former sense doesn't go back very far in the modern west for 
women, and in the latter sense remains problematic). For these 
societies, the pull of the modern has very much to do with (a) the 
modern's successful degrading of the non-modern to inferiority in all 
its dimensions (historical, material, and cultural), and (b) the 
attraction of goods, from watches to satellite TV, designer shirts to 
brick houses. In many dimensions, the pull of the modern and their 
attempt to assimilate to it in fact results in considerable loss of 
autonomy which sometimes is and sometimes is not felt as such (but 
even when not felt as such, the fact of bosses complaining about 
labour discipline, about such people working only for the periods 
they wish, and taking off and not showing their faces again until 
such time as they feel the need to do so suggests something about 
autonomy in work).

The latter -- the pull of material goods -- has always been there, 
the driving force behind the trade of sandalwood for salt, or 
machetes, or tobacco, or cloth. Except that while in previous eras, 
the pull of material goods was negotiated into their ways of living 
(and undoubtedly changed them as well), today, the socio-political 
context of the modern demands that the only way of accessing those 
material goods in some consistent fashion is to engage in the modern, 
specifically wage-work and all that that implies. And this is 
completed by schooling.

The generation gap is real enough, as the young see themselves as 
modern. And this has much to do with schooling and the devaluation of 
that which they came from. And parents will often enough rue the fact 
that they have to continue providing support -- in kind, even in cash 
-- to children who can't earn enough to sustain themselves in an 
urban modern context.

kj khoo