Threehegemons@aol.com wrote:
But putting that aside, if the question is what appeal modernity
has, a lecture from Foucault about how its all disciplinary anyway
isn't really apropo. The 'attraction' of modernity is certainly not
the black box camera in the school bus.
Yes and no, as I hope the ff. should make clear.
Modernity holds a lot of appeal for a lot of people--not only people
who want a new t-shirt or a car, but also people who want liberal
divorce laws, modern medicine, the ability to sleep with who they
want, the bright lights of the big cities... Yes, the promise of
modernity often turns out to be a fraud--inaccessible to some, not
what it seems to others. Yes, as well that 'traditional' cultures
aren't uniformally stifling (although many are, in many ways). Yes
as well some people are pushed into modern life because they're
kicked off their land, not because they want to enter it. But if
you want to develop an account of the spread of modern ideals that
moves beyond colonial elites and western settlers, you'll have to
take seriously some of the experienced drawbacks of people living in
'traditional' contexts and some of the experienced promises of
modernity (and keep in mind that the romantization as well as
denigration of 'pre-modern' life is a vital tradition of
modernity/post-modernity).
I guess a problem in such discussions is everyone has in mind
paradigmatic examples. I think distinctions must be drawn. For
instance, the appeal of the modern in such archetypal patriarchal and
class and caste riven societies as China or India would pretty much
be as you construct it. Although there's still the consideration of
the construction of "autonomy" -- there is a sense in which it is an
empty signifier into which one's preferred idea of "autonomy" is
poured.
But there are yet others. In a few days I'm going to a dinner on the
occasion of a harvest festival part of which is a 'beauty contest',
previously an unknown which is not to say that there were no
standards of 'beauty' but measured as by, e.g., the shape of the
calves and the arms (probably seen in relation to ability to work and
to walk long distances, since it was also applicable to men), of
societies where formerly the booze flowed freely, divorce was
liberal, sex was pretty free, and women went around topless (with
strict regulation as to unwanted touches of the exposed breast by
men), and the worst curse being for a woman to wave the skirt cloth
(a fairly skimpy affair) in which she gave birth over whoever or
whatever it was she wished to curse. Sure there was also much that
was stifling -- but really, is modern society any different in terms
of the combination of the 'liberating' and the 'stifling'?
Which brings us back to how and why some notions of autonomy gain
ascendancy over others, often only to come around again. To go back
to my own paradigmatic examples -- so the women were taught to robe
themselves as 'morality' to begin with, then as 'autonomy', and now
are being taught to selectively disrobe by way of current modes of
dress also as 'autonomy', to which elders and men now object in their
sisters and daughters, but will happily ogle at in others.
Then people rail against 'traditional' leaders, mainly because they
no longer play 'traditional' roles of largesse and stewardship, but
have gone in search of their own economic, social and political
autonomy, while insisting on the subservience of 'the people'. So the
people also go in search of their own autonomy in this regard.
As you say, denigration or romanticisation of the non or pre-modern
is part of modernity's own construction. But this is precisely where
rather than casting modernity as meaning autonomy and the non or
pre-modern as stifling it, an investigation into notions of autonomy
and of the ascendance and decline of different notions as well as
their interaction is, I think, a much more fruitful exercise than
casting the attractions of the modern as the 'autonomy' it offers.
When that has been done, it may perhaps be possible to weigh up which
forms and notions of autonomy are 'better' than others. To be non
reflexive about the notions of autonomy in the modern is, I think,
not on, no matter how attractive we moderns may find those notions.
kj khoo