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2015 James-They Have Never Been Modern PDF
2015 James-They Have Never Been Modern PDF
2015 James-They Have Never Been Modern PDF
Paul James1
the prefix ‘pre’. This is not to suggest that the writers of such
narratives always intend that pre-moderns are lesser peoples.
Certainly, contemporary discussions of the Islamic State have gone
further than most to link the concept of ‘the pre-modern’ to the
adjective ‘evil’,2 but the overwhelming tendency is to just take the
term ‘modernity’ for granted as a description of our times — with
the inevitable few wormholes of stagnation or regression eating
into the map of modernity. Defining other ways of life in the
negative can take the form of both arrogant assumptions of superi-
ority and well-meaning descriptions of ‘the Other’. There are even
attempts to retrieve the integrity of their pre-modern way of life.
Thus, by inference, at least in the gentler version of this narrative,
pre-moderns become those who are on an anticipated civilizational
climb. They are treated as those who are yet to achieve modern
actualization beyond their ‘past’ identities, anticipating their
‘future’ potentialities. Thus the prefix ‘pre’ puts them on a timeline
that tends to assume that being before means being less developed,
while being later means being more developed. They continue to
live in ways that are before modernity, just as ‘we’, usually
designated as Europeans, were the first to take the necessary
journey into the modern. When it comes to describing civilizational
differences, this journey is said to require a renaissance or major
reformation to become more than a technological gloss. They may
have mobile phones and run airlines, and they may build tall
towers in the desert, but because they did not go through a
religious reformation, the continuing archaisms in their culture will
always mean that they are prone to recursion, atavism, exotica and
… terrorism. It is amazing how many scholars and politicians in the
West have missed the fact that Islam has gone through a series of
reformations, not dissimilar to those of Christianity. Just as in the
allegory of the Persian love cake, it is their rose petals and saffron-
cream icing that have seduced us, while it is their archaic or pre-
modern power that we fear. Overall, we have not had time to know
them more than at a distance.
This tendency to treat the ‘pre-moderns’ as located at a distance
in time is linked to the way in which the equally problematic
concept of ‘development’ is used. The dominant distinction
between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ has for the last half century
2 <http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/03/16/has-christian-holocaust-begun-when-
will-west-wake-up-to-isis-threat/>, accessed 20 March 2015.
They Have Never Been Modern? 33
3 First elaborated in G. Sharp, ‘Constitutive Abstraction and Social Practice’, Arena no. 70,
1985, pp. 48–82.
They Have Never Been Modern? 35
4 This ‘constitutive levels’ position is thus equally uncomfortable with using the concept of
‘postmodernity’ to name a comprehensive condition in the way it is used by David Harvey,
for example: D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989.
5 M. Albrow, The Global Age: Society and State Beyond Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996.
They Have Never Been Modern? 37
6 S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedelus, vol. 29, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–29; S. N.
Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, vol. 2, Leiden, Brill, 2003.
7 J. Goody, The East in the West, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
38 Paul James
They accord with how we experience the world. And they are
relational claims, which is positive. In this sense, to the extent that
they are evidence-based descriptions rather than just normative
assertions such as ‘advanced’, they are useful as just that — descrip-
tions. However, as definitional claims they are ontologically flat.
They limit what can be said about social difference to processes that
make only a secondary difference to the meaning of social life.
Alternatively, defining the modern in terms of qualities gives a
stronger sense of the form of the modern: as the transient, the fleet-
ing, the contingent (Baudelaire); as the experience of contradiction
(Lefebvre); as social life forks into order and chaos (Bauman); as a
secularization of what went before (Blumenburg); as the period
that creates its normativity out of itself (Habermas); as the period
in which reflexivity turns upon itself (Giddens). However, each of
these sophisticated attempts still flounders for different and
various reasons that would take a dedicated volume to explore.
Proposition 6. Defining the modern is an epistemologically complex
task that entails defining the valences that constitute
a pattern of practice, a system of objects and/or a
circulation of meaning as modern. It requires defining
its own limits.
This sixth and final proposition is the core of my argument
elaborated below. To define an ontological formation, whether it be
the modern or any other, entails first working with basic categories
of existence such as time and space, and then showing what makes
such ontologies different for different formations. It is ‘epistemo-
logically complex’, not the least because making the claim that
something is modern requires a modern (or at least abstracting)
standpoint, and this is arguably best qualified through activities of
modern reflexivity and postmodern relativizing. That is, in
defining ‘the modern’ we need on the one hand to acknowledge
that defining ontological formations is a modern thing to do. Ways
of knowing prior to the modern were not especially interested in
defining or analyzing the socially based ontological standing of
their own standpoint. A traditional philosopher, scientist or king,
for example, deeply analyzed the foundations of being but did not
feel any compulsion to defend the grounding of being traditional.
A traditional way of life did not construct what modern critics call
‘invented tradition’. We need, on the other hand, to acknowledge
that modern epistemologists are compelled to do so. And this
They Have Never Been Modern? 39
8 J. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991, pp. 25–6.
40 Paul James
9 S. Rothwangl, ‘The Cosmological Circumstances and Results of the Anno Domini Invention:
Anno Mundi 6000, Great Year, Precession and End of the World Calculation’, in Anna-Teresa
Tymieniecka (ed.), Astronomy and Civilization in the New Enlightenment: Passions of the Skies,
Dordrecht, Springer, 2011.
10 See C. Brinton, The Jacobins: An Essay in New History, New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers
(1930), 2012, where he highlights the syncretic Christian dimension of the Jacobin faith: ‘et
dans ce moment que nos mains l’une dans l’autre recevaíent les dernières expressions de nos
âmes vos yeux et la voix ellevée vers le Ciel vous vous êtes ecriés, voilà, voilà les vrais Enfans
de la patrie, une Colonne de plus a la novelle constitution’ (p. 205). Here the new constitution
is evoked in the context of joined souls, with eyes and voice raised to heaven.
They Have Never Been Modern? 41
‘Modernity has never begun’, says Bruno Latour: ‘There has never
been a modern world’.11 This insistent repetition appears to make
very clear one half of his argument. And lest you think this is the
pronouncement of a postmodernist, he immediately goes on: ‘we
have never begun to enter the modern era. Hence the hint of the
ridiculous that always accompanies postmodern thinkers; they
claim to come after a time that has not even started!’12 Latour is
openly and consistently disdainful of postmodernists.
For all that, his approach has all the contradictory gestures of a
postmodernist. At the same time as the recurrent assertion ‘we have
11 B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 47.
12 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 47.
42 Paul James
13 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, pp. 10, 13, 29, 57.
14 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 78.
15 For an important elaborated critique of this position, see S. Cooper, ‘Regulating Hybrid
Monsters: The Limits of Latour and Actor Network Theory’, Arena Journal, new series no.
29/30, 2008, pp. 305–30.
They Have Never Been Modern? 43
18 In my terms, elaborated in the next section of this essay, these are the peoples who live in and
through the dominance of traditional ontologies oriented around cosmological and
metaphorical valences. They do not live in worlds constituted in the same way as customary
peoples, even though their life-worlds are built upon and reconstitute valences of the
customary: genealogical, mythological and analogical relations.
19 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 6.
They Have Never Been Modern? 45
23 H. Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, Columbia University Press, New
York, 2013, p. 5.
48 Paul James
24 G. Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000,
London, Sage Publications, 1995, p. 4.
25 Rosa, Social Acceleration, p. 29.
26 Rosa, Social Acceleration, pp. 29–30.
They Have Never Been Modern? 49
29 It seems uncomfortable to take only one additional social theme to have our definition of the
modern turn upon when previously we used three themes for tribalism and two additional
themes for traditionalism. However, it seems to be enough for our purposes. Given the
methodological principles of simple usefulness and sufficient complexity, I am currently
going with it while remaining open to better suggestions.
30 Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991, p. 5.
31 Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 6.
32 Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 7.
33 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 47.
They Have Never Been Modern? 53
both of the dominant entities that once gave them meaning: God
and Nature. Time becomes the medium of passing or lost moments,
mapped day by day onto empty calendrical grids. In positive
terms, this is the form of temporality that allows for creative
historicity. It sensitizes politics. That is, it leaves the space for
reflection upon ‘historical time’ as it is measured (tautologously)
across time and space. But it is also a form of time in which, para-
doxically, crisis-consciousness becomes endemic while actual crises
lose their generality and ontological force. Crises become contested
points in history. The postmodern takes this one stage further to
where social life is reframed in terms of contested standpoints — a
kind of relativism that I would argue even fragments the possibility
of politically projecting or understanding other worlds.
In terms of the basic approach of the present essay, that task
requires both research and engaged practice. The same applies in
answering the question ‘How can one be a Persian?’ There is noth-
ing automatic about that task. It can only be answered by deep
research in the particular time and place to which the question is
directed. Across global history, Persians were part of making mod-
ernity, and they have lived in and across the same valences as the
rest of us. To what extent a particular Persian person is customary,
traditional, modern or postmodern depends upon which person,
what community, you are talking about. And finding out depends
upon letting them speak. The present volume is intended to begin
that task in relation to very different examples from across the
Middle East and North Africa.