Re: Modernity & Politics

In a message dated 5/29/2003 3:54:52 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
kjkhoo@pop.jaring.my writes:
> 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.
My original goal was to try to answer Khaldoun's question about the attractions 
of modernity, not evaluate modernity.  I think this remains an interesting 
question, more interesting than my evaluations.  Right now it seems as if 
'modern' is a meaningful description of most people in the world, even if 
oversimplified. Plenty of people at the very bottom of the world system seem 
highly modern in many ways. They hold beliefs in their autonomy (or 'freedom') 
even if frequently violated, they struggle along transnational scales of 
cultural and other forms of capital... How did that happen?  Did it happen 
entirely because they were 'taught' to do that, or because aspects of the 
modern seemed alluring?  I suspect lots of the contestants in that beauty 
contest are drawn to it, rather than being pushed (a dichotomy, but a fairly 
meaningful one), due to the immense amounts of transnational cultural capital 
that seem to adhere to those judged 'beautiful'. This doesn't mean that I think 
beauty contests are liberating or good, but that their appeal to contestants 
can be explained. I would look to forces like the advertising industry and peer 
culture as a lot more potent in this respect than the opinions of modernist 
social scientists (and if the modernist social scientists' opinions are 
important, how exactly do their values become those of people far away from 
centers of academic thought?).
Modern, of course, is an extremely opaque term, one which describes lots of 
thing that are often contradictory, some of which I might believe are 'good' 
and some 'bad'....  Its vagueness is part of its appeal.  Its part of how we 
got here and why it seems so difficult to exit. Recall that Foucault believed 
that the Iranian revolution provided a release from modernist discipline (he 
died shortly after).  Today, it does not appear that the Iranian engagement 
with modernity is by any means over, again, not only because of the pressures 
of global power structures, but also the pressures from below, within Iranian 
society. 
Steven Sherman