Re: More on Modernity and Politics

Krishnendu writes,

<<Elements of the modern, such as Modernism, are
deeply pessimistic, ironic, distancing - hardly
cultural modes for purposive, active, bourgeois 
accumulators. That is why I find it very difficult to
buy your narrow use of the concept.>>

Everything you say here I agree with.  After the
slaughter of World War I, for example, many western
thinkers began to question the basic premises of
modernity and modernization.  Of course, this was much
less in the US than in Europe.  But it is also true,
from simple observation of the literature from the
late eighteenth century and on, most western thinkers
and elites concluded that "the non-modern"
civilizations lacked the discipline, rationality, and
the abstraction of the modern order of things.  They
looked around the globe and saw a West rising to
supremacy and concluded from that experience that
European modes of thought and social organization,
independent of the south/east, is due to some embedded
superiority of their own cultures.  I can see you and
Steve seem to agree on this point, and that this
shaped their perception of "the modern" and the "non
modern."  

But this is not an instrumentalist explanation.  If my
apartment was sanitary and well maintained while yours
was filthy and insanitary, I may conclude that I am of
a better stock and came from a better family than you.
 But if the cause of your filth and unhealthy living
condition is due to a plumbing problem coming from my
apartment, dumping on to yours, than we know that your
unhealthy living condition is tied up with my actions
and my unwillingness to fix the problem.  Now what I'm
trying to say is that the discourse of modernity does
not allow us to see the faulty plumbing, simply
blaming you for your bad and poor upbringing while
congratulating myself.  

Many Jewish settlements, for instance, have open sewer
pipes that run and contaminate Palestinian farms and
villages.  Now when the Jewish settler talks about the
Palestinians, in many instance he/she complains that
Palestinian villages smell and are unkept, insanitary,
and not as modern as ours, failing to see how the
apartheid system has choked and destroyed these same
villages.  This is the power of modern discourse: we
are so interconnected that to speak of modernity here
and backwardness there makes no sense.  But yet that
is exactly the discourse of modernity: they can deal
with the non-modern only as the absence of modernity. 
They refuse to see the defects in the plumbing,
untill, of course, the plumbing problem begins to flow
into their homes.  This is not instrumental thinking.

Yes, both elites and the subalterns do find meaning
outside of the accumulation issue (elites) or just
being duped (subalterns). This is a different issue
that I would  not answer the same way as I did above. 
So we are probably talking about two different things
here.  Desires and pleasures should never be reduced
to instrumental causes, you are correct.  But the
discourse of modernity shapes and influences the
chanelling of our desires and pleasures.  They are
represented as a struggle between reason and passion. 
As Timothy Mitchell comments, "reason is a shared, and
therefore public, faculty, which attempts to
discipline and educate the self, whereas passion or
desire is private, interior,and thus the source of
individuality and of the difference from one person to
the next."  Again, as Foucault has shown, "sexuality,
pleasures, and desires, are invented as the domain
that mediates between physical desire and its
psychological management.  The theory of private
management or 'repression' of desires that cannot be
accomodated to the laws of public life becomes
critical to the birth of the modern European subject,
helping to maintain the new public and private spheres
in alignment with each other."  But again, this is a
different issue and needs to be handled separately.

Yes, modernity does have a popular reception among
different audiences, but my reflections on why that is
the case will have to wait for a future posting.

Khaldoun




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