A seductive idea animates the work presented in the following pages: limit. Limits are intrinsic to thought; a fortiori, they are inherent to the historically determined, ethnocentric configuration of methodical and narrative thinking about the forms of human collective existence called social theory. It is not unusual that when a suspicion of the existence of limits abandons the meanders of marginality to acquire the status of a redundant intellectual awareness, the theoretical territories those limits used to etch call for a different designation of their reciprocal definitional borders. The different designation I propose consists in the disentanglement of the sociological imagination from the ubiquity of modernity. What I contest is the unquestioned reliance on the idea of modernity in social theory. What I investigate is the revocability of modernity as a historical-sociological, epistemological and logical frame. The core argument of this book is that the idea of modernity constrains social theory within the very boundaries that should be problematized. These boundaries are either the limits that the notion of modernity draws around the comprehension and interpretation of long-term and large-scale processes of social and historical change, or the limits that modernity as a frame of thinking sets about the possibilities of elaborating post-Eurocentric categories for thinking the world.
The invocation of modernity remains the fundamental epistemological ritual at the heart of identity-and-difference for the community of social scientists, even where this invocation conveys disagreement and contestation. Bhambra correctly argues that âsociology arises alongside a self-understanding of a world-historically significant modernityâ and that âthe institutions and practices of that modernity are neither self-contained nor adequately expressed within the self-understanding of modernityâ (2014: 142). Unthinking Modernity explores the border between the self-understanding of modernity and what exceeds it. For the way this border is imagined, traced and transgressed marks the fault line between global social theory and its mise en scène. What exceeds modernity firmly demands the possibility of unthinking and decolonizing the existing conceptual and terminological apparatus of social theory, in order to move towards different protocols of concept formation whose logic is not entirely inferable from the conceptual archive of the West and its epistemological architecture.Modernity is both a structure of power, and a mode of power. As a structure of power, it is an ideology bounded to Western domination and white supremacy. As Dussel (2000: 497) puts it, it is a way âto manage centralityâ. As a mode of power, as Wang Hui (2011) clarifies, it is implemented by multiple actors and subjectivities that are hierarchically distributed, moved by specific needs, put under determined pressures, yet transversally positioned in front of meta-geographical dualisms such as Europe/Others, West/East, North/South, metropolis/colonies.1 In the latter conception, the idea of modernity can be mobilized to preserve, to manage or even to contest hierarchies, although contestation is relegated to an inability to break the tacit agreement about what it is possible to change and what has to be left untouched.
Wallerstein affirms that âit is quite normal for scholars and scientists to rethink issues. ⌠In that sense, much of nineteenth century social science, in the form of specific hypotheses, is constantly being rethought. But, in addition to rethinking, which is ânormalâ, I believe we need to âunthinkâ nineteenth century social science, because many of its presumptionsâwhich, in my view, are misleading and constrictiveâstill have far too strong a hold on our mentalities. These presumptions, once considered liberating of the spirit, serve today as the central intellectual barrier to useful analysis of the worldâ (Wallerstein 2001: 1). Unthinking Modernity starts from the conclusion that there are enough reasons to place the idea of modernity at the top of the list of these misleading and constrictive presumptions. This task cannot be accomplished in the short run: the adequacy of our available categories relies heavily on the aforementioned barriers. Barriers protect the legitimacy of categories, and categories reciprocate by diverting existing epistemological strategies from pointing to the underlying foundations of those barriers towards tactical heuristic, often evanescent, targets. Reconstructing a global social theory as far away as possible from the myopias of ethnocentricity, class, sexual orientation, age, gender, race, ethnicity biases, and all the dualisms that compose the colonial matrix of power in modernity, will depend on how accurate the contemporary collective effort to free our mentalities from erroneous theoretical prejudices has been. The response might, or might not, come from within human and social sciences. However, no doubt human and social sciences are well positioned to take part in this struggle. And the struggle is not going to be a Blitzkrieg.
Why Science
The erudite Neapolitan humanist Gian Battista della Porta was notorious for mastering the marvels of polyalphabetic cryptography, that is, a system for encoding and decoding secret messages across more than ten different alphabets. The key-code of polyalphabetic cryptography was called verme letterale (literary worm). Science is my verme letterale to unthink modernity and decolonize social theory. Science is intended in a specific way in the context of this book: either as a narrative structure upon which Western thinking relies in order to endow modernity with its own myth of the origin (euhemerism), or as a protocol of legitimization for the epistemological status upon which social sciences, in their historical construction, entrust their nomothetic aspirations (nomotechnique).
While the fetishes of the French and American Revolutions are functional to the narratives of political modernity (Bhambra 2015; Shilliam 2015), and the fetish of the Industrial Revolution is functional to the narratives of socio-economic modernity (Parthasarathi 2011), the historiographical fetish of the Scientific Revolution is essential for the narratives of scientific modernity.
In this book it is argued that a different social theory can emerge from active efforts to bring to the surface non-Eurocentric historical narratives and explanations, as a step forward from what Kapil Raj (2007) refers to as the ârelocationâ of modernity in the global space, through the reconstruction of the connected histories of science. In recent decades, the relationship between Eurocentrism, science and the colonial formation of the notion of modernity has been explored, contested and partly reversed. Three basic assumptions about scientific modernity have been destabilized: the idea of the transition to modernity thought in terms of the passage from medieval scientia to modern science; the predominantly European character of modern science; and the global dimension of the diffusion of modern science to the rest of the world. The idea of the transition to modernity thought in terms of the passage from medieval scientia to modern science has been challenged by continuist approaches in historiography of science, which have shown the conjectural nature of many of the space-time boundaries imagined between Europe and the Rest, and between the modern age and the global Middle Ages (Elman 2005; Saliba 2007). The predominantly European character of modern science has been strongly contested by thick inquiries into the enormous contribution of other non-Western scientific traditions to the emergence of what nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western historiography has attributed to the âEuropean geniusâ (Bala 2006, 2012; Joseph 2011). The global dimension of the diffusion of modern science to the rest of the world has been deeply undermined by the contextual analysis of the intricate ways in which science is produced by continuous and connected interactions. The notion of the âcolonial penetrationâ of science into the non-Western world needs to be reframed and rethought in a relational theoretical scenario: colonial subjects co-produced science, albeit within asymmetrical structures of power and resources distribution (Fan 2004; Harding 2011; Raj 2013).
The significance of science is not limited to the role it plays in the multiple narratives of global modernity. The Western dream of producing a science of society is still attached to modern science (Keat and Urry 2011). Yet, this cognitive tie has undergone relevant changes. Natural science, as every practitioner knows, is hardly conceivable in unitary terms.2 Even the connotation of ânaturalâ is currently challenged by the pervasiveness of simulation and modeling in the living tissue of scientific enterprises.3 Nonetheless, the science to which the social sciences refer is not the exploded, and often collapsed, irreducible multiplicity of knowledges, protocols, idioms, aspirations and failures ranging from applied experimental microscopy to pure mathematical speculation over dark matter, the origins of the universe or supersymmetry.4 The epistemological and methodological foundations of modern science have been undermined in the twentieth century (Feyerabend and Lakatos 1999; Prigogine 1997; Smolin 2006). Science does not hold fast to its seat on one side of the âtwo-cultures splitâ (Wallerstein 1999).5 Decisive ambiguities in the epistemological status of the social sciences resonate with the ambiguous epistemological status of science, also because post-World War II sociology and historiography of science have been effective in dismantling the ideological nature of the presumed neutrality of the former (Ashman and Baringer 2001; Latour 1993; Poovey 1998; Shapin 1994). In social theory, âscienceâ incarnates less a nomothetic aspiration and more a nomotechnique of legitimization. Patrick Jackson reaffirms that âto invoke âscienceâ is to call to mind a panoply of notions connected with truth, progress, reason, and the likeâand, perhaps more importantly, to implicitly reference a record of demonstrated empirical successâ (Jackson 2011: 3). This invocation remains the main pillar of the epistemological ritual of modernity because, more than other connotations Western thinking attributed to its exceptional historical path, science holds a stronger universalistic appeal to a presumed superior and reliable form of rationality. Thus the decolonization of social theory cannot prescind by a deep critical engagement with science.
The Coloniality of Method
The route taken by this book leads toward a global social theory. This route consists in questioning and rewriting either the words, or the protocols, or the rituals that the colonial and imperial history of social sciences have elaborated, taught and reproduced through the idea of modernity. Modernity is not merely an extensible set of properties or pro...