What might a book entitled ‘Modernity Theory’ conceivably be about? ‘Modern’ is a widely used term, apparently with a combination of vagueness and relativism built into it: anything can be modern, nothing is inherently so; it all seems irreducibly contextual. To suggest a tentative way through all this, one might suggest that modernity is flux, constant change. Yet that will not do, as it stands: it is not the case that everything changes, all the time, or at the same rate; and much seems barely to change at all. To amend Marx somewhat, one might suggest that not everything that is solid does melt into air, but that it can do so. It is not so much flux per se that is an omnipresent feature of modern experience, but a sense of the irreducible contingency of the world. And that contingency exists in various registers: practical, moral, cosmological. This seems, paradoxically, to imply a necessity in contingency, as if it might manifest its own opposite: so perhaps we can bring flux back into the picture as the unpredictable manifestation of contingency, the pragmatic resolution of this contradiction. And the contingency is further evident in the relation between flux or change and its cause: for any particular case of flux is a contingent consequence of some cause that never wholly determines it, that it always exceeds, that always has unexpected ramifications. Just as modernist ontology elaborates the consequences of this, so modernism in the arts attempts to respond to this, to capture its representational dynamics while simultaneously revelling in the crises of content and form that this necessarily produces—even if the result may produce artworks whose qualities of form and pattern can hint at a permanence that their aspirations ostensibly query.
In whatever form it presents itself, modernity always seems to institute a break, situating itself against something, whether pre-modern or non-modern, a break that threatens to recur endlessly. The content of this has varied, broadly, from the juxtaposition to the ‘classical’ age to the more recent separation from the alleged primitive ‘other’ of colonial times, or to a generalized notion of ‘tradition’, and this positions modernity as frame, rather than content; a way of apprehending experience, rather than that experience in itself. It is therefore inseparable from depicting or narrating the world, while aware that it is an intervention in the world, and to this extent, institutes another break, thereby doubling the original one. If we put all this in temporal terms, we can say that modernity separates itself from past and present—which is a way of saying it thereby separates itself from time itself, not in order to present itself as transcendental or eternal, but as recurrent, embodying the perpetual displacement of the reflexive, as the attempt to grasp its own activity. Modernity displays this perpetual reflexivity of the process through ‘display’ itself, through forms that constitute its irreducibly aesthetic dimension. There is modern art, but there is also the art of being modern.
To insert ‘theory’ into all this is quite difficult. Theorizing seems to be an act of appropriating experiences of contingency in apodictic categories which might seem to aspire to a universality and necessity incompatible with those experiences themselves. If this is a creative tension for modernism, now using that term in the broad sense of the ‘modern attitude’ and modern consciousness , it would seem potentially crippling for anything that purported to be ‘modernity theory’. At the same time, there is a significant aspect of this modern attitude that comes into view here: namely, the orientation of control, the use of technology and rational organization to harness the forces of nature for human purposes. One might see this as an attempt to impose a ‘necessity’ here, the requirement that nature be, or be made, ‘predictable’, as an essential pragmatic imperative of this drive to mastery. Contingency, as a feature of the experience of modernity, becomes problematical as an impediment to the realization of modernity as a project. And here, at least, we seem to be engaging with some relatively firm historical moorings, just as this could be said to ground the appropriation of all this in a form of theory that would respect these twin elements of historical contingency and control.
If we are to refer to ‘modernity theory’, then, we are not referring to some enterprise that offers the timeless claims of classical philosophy; we are responding to these very efforts to think modernity that have been a feature of Western cultures since, perhaps, the eighteenth century, and, more prominently and obsessively, since roughly the mid-nineteenth century, with a further burst of interest in the late twentieth century, linked to speculation about the possibility of the ‘postmodern ’. We are doing this by returning to one central feature of all these efforts, referred to above, namely the reflexivity of these accounts: their acceptance of their own embeddedness in the very processes they purport to reflect, reflect on, and describe, even though it is only in recent decades that theories of ‘reflexive modernization’ 1 have propelled the very reflexivity of the theories themselves into the foreground. Their acceptance of the contingencies of the world means that whether they offer categorial frameworks, of varying levels of ambition, or merely aspects of implicit theorizing, they cannot, in the end, plausibly offer definitive apodictic claims for their own activities, contributing as they do to the very unfolding of what they offer a perspective on. Reflecting on the presuppositions of theory has to be incorporated into doing it, and taking account of the inevitable disjunctions, the incommensurability of the one and the other.
Accepting this, we can suggest that modernity theory has implied an informal categorial framework based on the notion of ‘orientation ’. If an orientation situates us in the world, it also relates us to the world; it positions the world as our context, something we belong to, but also something we objectify, separate ourselves from. It includes an essentially physical dimension: orientation is embodied, exists in space and time, as movement, as positioning and repositioning, yet we also experience it subjectively and grasp it reflexively. In the context of modernity theory, three aspects or dimensions can usefully be distinguished: project , which orients us to the world as to an object used instrumentally; experience, which situates us in the world, subject to feeling , to currents of sensation , in a state of passivity that can nevertheless be seen as active, hence ‘passion’ as what affects us but can also drive us; and representation , the way we map the world of perception as image , through senses and technology, hence relating to it non-instrumentally, even as there can be said to be an implicit reversibility here, in that it can also be said to represent itself to us. In the latter case, we must also remember that the world as represented includes the world postulated as being ‘inside’ ourselves, as ‘the self ’, inscrutable save as representations that can be externalized in the form of expressive projections, just as this content can only be read internally as if in some sense already external.
Within this overall framework, it might be worth pointing, rather briefly, to some of the central and distinctive emphases of this book. Firstly, this is, in a sense, an ontology of the modern, exploring the simultaneous dogmatism and instability of fundamental modern assumptions about being and non-being, about what exists, the real and the unreal, due not just to the withdrawal of religious guarantees (an ontological version of the ‘death of God’), but also a range of other factors. There is, notably, the awareness of the slippage between perception, imagination and memory (an insight of Kant’s philosophy), raising issues of figuration, questioning the boundary between literal and metaphorical, with implications for the status of fantasy and theories of an unconscious ; then there is the development of technologies of representation that become forms of reproduction and trouble us with problems over the status of simulation and virtuality; and, finally, there are the paradoxes of the reflexive itself, in part embedded in the indeterminacy theories central to modern science. Hence although contemporary controversies over ‘post-truth’ are doubtless precipitated primarily by the politics of melodramatic embattlement discussed in later chapters, they may also respond to these profound ontological uncertainties, as they come ever more clearly to the surface.
One intriguing aspect of this, with epistemological ramifications as well, is the status of the subject/object distinction, central to modern philosophical reflection from Kant through to contemporary ‘object-oriented’ ontology. An uncertainty here seems indeed to be a constitutive instability of Kant’s system, just as this refracts instabilities of modern culture and consciousness. In this book, we return to that maelstrom of ideas in Germany in the 1790s to encounter the critical assimilation and displacement of Kant’s ideas in early German Romanticism , 2 suggesting that we thereby encounter the potential for a theory of reflexive displacement that could provide a perspective on this subject/object relation beyond the instrumental, exploitative rationality of the project of modernity yet is also intrinsically ‘modern’. Such a perspective remains crucially Kantian in that it does not ultimately resolve the issue of subject/object boundaries, implying instead a medium of interaction whereby subject and object are emergent, rather than given or presupposed. The later work of Benjamin provides further insight into the notion of a medium as the grounding of such a relation, opening up new ways of looking at the nature of ‘media ’ and their place in the modern world. It can also be suggested that this casts light on the transformation of the notion of space and time from an objective framework to properties or aspects of the media out of which subjects and objects are constituted. And all this is, in turn, reflected in current controversies over the status of the ‘self-image’: is one’s image, or appearance, an ‘object’ one ‘owns’ and has control over?
A focus on these themes implies a degree of critical distance from a better-known tradition of interpretation, stemming from the Hegelian constitution of the subject as the distinctively historical subject of rational, dialectical self-development, in turn incorporating a particular reading of Marx, emphasizing the material base of contradictory economic forces, and running on into perhaps the most influential later perspective, that of the Frankfurt School theorists. For them, the culture industry subordinates art to the needs of consumerism, dulls the critical faculties with ideological mystification, and produces alienated subjects incapable of perceiving their real needs and interests. There is a pervasive functionalism here, reducing culture and experience to the one dimension of meeting the ‘needs’ of capitalism, along with the reification of reason inherent in reducing its workings to an all-pervasive rationalization of life; and this suggests an unnecessarily reductive notion of reason, in two stages, firstly identifying it with the instrumental rationality of project, and then identifying this, in turn, with the imperatives of capitalism. The latter actually pulls against the great insight of the former: the way the freedom/control dynamic, central to the Western construction of instrumental reason, collapses into its opposite, the circular self-justification of the rationalization process, does not need to depend on, or be reducible to, the market economy, and may indeed be in some ways productive of it. As for the former, it is indeed true that the reflexive element is indeed all too often subsumed within this rationalizing imperative, rather than serving as a recurrent opening to the ‘otherness’ that is also implicit here; yet this ignores the potential of the reflexive self-displacement of reason, assuming it will always and necessarily collapse back into rationalization. The Horkheimer and Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3 surely the founding text of this approach, rightly retains its classic status but is also vitiated by these in...