Re: Modernity & Politics

In a message dated 5/30/2003 1:44:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
ibnsubhi@yahoo.com writes:

> I think part of the problem is that I'm looking at the
> discourse of modernity while you pose it as a hard,
> solid structure.  This may accout for why you can't
> see the connection to race.  But you seem to have a
> grasp of the connection already. 

I am not sure in what sense you think I see modernity as a 'hard, solid 
structure.'  I pretty much think its anything people talk about when they talk 
about being modern.  That's a lot of different things--not only social science 
discourse, which I think you grant too much importance to if you want to look 
at the spread of the idea of modernity--novels and, in the twentieth century, 
film and television are incomparably more important.  Aspects of modern 
discourse have been around for millenia, in many different places--in the last 
two centuries, it became the leading discourse of virtually all centers of 
power, and in the last fifty years has been embraced by large numbers nearly 
everywhere.


Why do those near the bottom often appreciate modern life?  For the same 
reasons you and I do, my friend.  I strongly recommend Expectations of 
Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt by James 
Ferguson, something of a critique of the critique of modernity, by the author 
of one of the key texts critiquing developmentism, The Anti-Politics Machine.  
The best line in the more recent text is when Ferguson asks a retiring miner if 
he is looking forward to returning to rural life, which he has been forced to 
do since the pension fund he was counting on vanished in one economic crisis or 
another.  "Would you?" the miner replies, deconstructing in two words the 
otherness of the anthropological subject.  I don't think you need to be James 
Scott to understand where he's coming from.

Living in the US, I think its quite deconstructive of current discourse to 
emphasize the modernity of most people worldwide.  There are still powerful 
images that people in Africa basically live in tribal societies, people in the 
middle east are removed from modern life by religion, etc (see such recent big 
budget films as 'Independence Day' and 'The Mexican').  On the left, there are 
often notions of noble suffering victims of imperialism/capitalism that obscure 
the ways women in sweatshops, Palestinians, et al have pretty much the same 
modern desires that we do.  One can go on and on about how their basic needs 
aren't being met--but what if they also want a new pair of sneakers, or one of 
those obnoxiously loud stereos booming out of a car?

One may ask--why do academics (myself often included) so badly want to assert 
their post-modernity, or in some other way distance themselves from modernist 
discourses?  Could it possibly be a case of status anxiety, that as the masses 
have caught up with modernity, there is a rush to move onto something else?  
Just something to consider.

Steven Sherman