3.

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF (POST)MODERNITY

THE TERMINOLOGY OF MODERNITY

Modernity is a key concept in the understanding of coloniality and
modern colonialism. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies:
The Key Concepts makes it clear:
The concept of modernity is therefore significant in the emergence of
colonial discourse. Modernity is fundamentally about conquest, ‘the
imperial regulation of land, the discipline of the soul, and the creation of
truth’ (Turner 1990: 4), a discourse that enabled the largescale regulation of
human identity both within Europe and its colonies. The emergence of
modernity is co-terminous with the emergence of Euro-centrism and the
European dominance of the world effected through imperial expansion. In
other words, modernity emerged at about the same time that European
nations began to conceive of their own dominant relationship to a non-
European world and began to spread their rule through exploration,
cartography and colonization. Europe constructed itself as ‘modern’ and
constructed the non-European as ‘traditional’, ‘static’, ‘prehistorical’. The
imposition of European models of historical change became the tool by
which these societies were denied any internal dynamic or capacity for
development. (131)
It should be noted that this is the softer version of understanding
modernity’s relation with coloniality. A more radical approach is
documented by Walter D. Mignolo:
For me the hidden agenda (and darker side) of modernity was coloniality. . . .
The basic thesis is the following: ‘modernity’ is a European narrative that
hides its darker side, coloniality. Coloniality, in other words, is constitutive
of modernity — there is no modernity without coloniality. (39)
A few remarks on terminology might be helpful. The use of the
collocation “modern age” (like “the age of Shakespeare”) is metonymical
and a logical fallacy of the pars pro toto kind. Modern/modernizing/
modernist practices and discourses, even when they are predominant in one
Postcolonialism Bogdan Ştefănescu 113

way or another (scale, dominion, importance, frequency, span, efficiency as

agency of change etc.), are not the only ones occurring at that time and the
“age” cannot be reduced to them entirely. The “modern age” should be seen
as no more than a yardstick of universalist Eurocentric chronology with no
explanatory or descriptive value.
“The modern” ought to be used as the name for an attitude, mentality
or episteme construed from the primacy of human emancipation and of
confidence in progress (knowledge and technology), reason/reasonability
(mutual understanding and tolerance), humans’ dominating intellectual
power (harnessing the elements, taming the wild, and civilizing the
primitive), universalism, standardization and social/cultural homogeneity
through institutions such as legislations, political and administrative bodies,
science, education, the mass media.
“Modernization/modernizing” refers to the integrated activities of a
progressive vision aiming to harness inventions and the renovation of extant
institutions in a society (i.e., pushing them to a new evolutionary stage) to
the agenda of “the modern”. Modernization was the agenda of Western
culture roughly since the Enlightenment and it became a separate discipline
of academic study after WWII. According to Couze Venn, modernization
has always been a mechanism for the reproduction of Western hegemony is
the fallback of modernity in postcolonial late modernity:
The loss of faith in the great political doctrines which expressed these
narratives, namely liberalism and Marxism, has altered the historical basis
of the legitimation of power in modernity. The relationship between
modernity and modernization has become one of performativity: modernity
is what is effected through modernization. (Venn 52)
“Modernism” is an aesthetic/artistic movement that came as a late
critical reaction against “the modern” and exalted primitivism, irrationalism
(in the form of spiritualism, intuitionism or absurdism), social detachment
and anarchism, intimacy, private experience, and the inner universe,
aesthetic unconventionalism, anti-realism and antimoralism in the arts etc.
Modernism meant both invention and recycling, working within the
paradigm of progress and innovative change, but also against it. Intuition,
114 Bogdan Ştefănescu Postcommunism

insight, anarchism, prophetic/manic vision, aestheticism, symbolism are all

really recycled romantic weapons in the war against the modern as a
paradigm of rationality and domination, yet they preserve and revise the
notions of progress/evolution/benefic change, universalism, emancipation
of man, and, not least of all, domination. For Habermas, “aesthetic
modernity” (by which he means avant-garde “modernism”) is a “new”
(sic!) form of time consciousness as a revolt against the false normativity of
history written in the modern idiom:
On the other hand, the time consciousness articulated in avant-garde art is
not simply ahistorical; it is directed against what might be called a false
normativity in history. The modern, avant-garde spirit has sought, instead,
to use the past in a different way; it disposes over those pasts which have
been made available by the objectifying scholarship of historicism, but it
opposes at the same time a neutralized history, which is locked up in the
museum of historicism. (“Modernity versus Postmodernity” 4-5)
What Habermas seems to say is that “modernism”, though one of the
most illustrious moments in the criticism of the modern (episteme), does
not really amount to a transcending of the modern, but is locked in/with the
logic of modern historicism. The idea is carried over in the analysis of Roy
Boyne and Ali Rattansi who distinguish “modernism” from “modernity”
(“the modern” episteme in my terminology) and testify that
despite its inevitable links with modernity, modernism always also
constituted a critique of modernity, for it clearly refused to endorse any
simplistic beliefs in the progressive capacity of science and technology to
resolve all problems, nor did it hold with positivism and the idea of the
integrated individual subject that provided the aesthetic, philosophical and
psychological underpinning for the celebratory grand narratives of both
capitalist and socialist versions of modernity. (8)
“Modernity” is the most ambitious and encompassing concept in this
terminological cluster (but, perhaps, also the most ambiguous and
objectionable). Its use encompasses the notional content of all the other
terms, “the modern age”, “the modern”, “modernization”, and “modernism”
and it refers equally to the age, the emancipatory and progressive attitude,
to the sweeping program of renewal, as well as to the critique of all aspects
of modernity that are clearly dominated by (though not necessarily
Postcolonialism Bogdan Ştefănescu 115

beginning or ending with) the realist discourse of capitalism and the

universalist discourse of the Enlightenment. “Late modernity”, a concept
promoted by Jürgen Habermas, David Harvey, and Anthony Giddens, is a
radically reflexive form of modernity itself. To use a mechanical metaphor,
it is a liminal state of a motor system (be it living or artificial) that indicates
that the system has at the same time reached its performance peak and is
closest to a breach.

DEFINING TRAITS AND SUBCATEGORIES OF MODERNITY

Naturally, one cannot detach Western modernity from its material
grounding in capitalist finance, trade, and industry, pragmaticism, or
technological advancement, all of which illustrate the constant drive for
modernization in Western modernity. However, as a result of the “linguistic
turn” in twentieth-century critical theories, modernity has been more and
more associated with certain discourses.
A host of canonical critics of modernity place the Enlightenment at
the core of the modern cultural paradigm. Habermas takes the
Enlightenment (an “unfinished project”) to be the final dissolving of the
spell of the classics and the rise of a belief in modern science and the
infinite progress of knowledge, of social and moral betterment (“Modernity
versus Postmodernity” 4). Wayne Gabardi also submits that the
Enlightenment was the high point of modernity (3).
Zygmunt Bauman describes this episteme in terms of a universalist
humanism, dualistic (either/or) epistemology, instrumental rationality, and
individualist ethos (qtd. in Gabardi 19). Habermas also anoints humanism
as the crux of the philosophical project of the Enlightenment which replaces
divine providence with the autonomous rational human mind (qtd. in
Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies 146). Confidence in the
rational approach of science is another aspect of the modern episteme as
Max Weber pointed out. Among the main foci of the modern project were
the institutionalization of objective science, the universalization of morality
116 Bogdan Ştefănescu Postcommunism

and law, and the autonomization of art (qtd. in Habermas “Modernity

versus Postmodernity” 8). Gabardi takes the modern attitude to consist in a
belief in human perfectibility and a solid optimism about the rational
powers of humanity (3). Bauman described this optimism as a self-
confidence or superiority complex on the part of the modern, which, unlike
postmodernity, lacked self-consciousness (134-5).
All of these features of the modern episteme seem to be firmly rooted
in the discourse of liberal rationalism as described by Hayden White (22
and passim). Bauman, too, talks of a Whiggish vision of modernity as an
era of rationality (Docherty 131) and David Cook finds that modern
capitalist society accomplishes the main tenets of liberalism: freedom and
equality (Docherty 120).
But modernity is more than that. It accommodates several divergent
discourses with their implied ideologies. In describing the complications of
modernity, Habermas intimates there are certain inflections of a more
rebellious time-consciousness of a radical and anarchist sort, especially in
cultural and aesthetic modernity14. He also relegates contemporary critics of
the Enlightenment project of modernity to various species of conservative
ideology: antimodern young conservatives, premodern old conservatives,
and postmodern neoconservatives (“Modernity versus Postmodernity” 15).
David Weir is one of many critics to equate modernism with anarchism. For
him, anarchism succeeded culturally where it failed politically. He
documents the structural resemblance between modernist culture and
anarchism, both based on fragmentation, autonomy, and diversity, and he
warns that there is a problem of reconciling aesthetic modernism with
social modernity (4-7).
On an intellectual plane, there seems to be a set of polar oppositions
between the modern episteme, modernization, and modernism. If the
modern episteme was a liberal belief in human access to the universality of

14
I am using the terms “liberal”, “radical”, “anarchist”, and “conservative” in line
with White’s appropriation of Karl Mannheim’s descriptions of these ideological
types in Ideology and Utopia (1936).
Postcolonialism Bogdan Ştefănescu 117

the natural and social realms, then modernization was a radical drive to
satisfy the egocentrism of the capitalist subject. If modern liberalism is
haunted by homogeneity, modernizing radicalism aspires to diversity:
As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman puts it, while modernity championed
universality, homogeneity, monotony, and clarity, modernization produced
radical plurality, variety, contingency, and ambivalence. (Gabardi 19)
Aesthetic modernism is the anarchist rejection of the tyranny of
reason and the real. It is the deep or transcendental subject that interests the
modernist, the autonomous individuality of creation and cohabitation. The
anarchist vision of modernism aims at heterogeneity just like radical
modernization, but it is devoted to the impalpable. Modernist artists, unlike
radical modernizers, have no materialist inclinations. Anarchist modernism
stands in a double opposition to modern liberalism, since it is at once a
rejection of universalizing drives of the Enlightenment and of the realist
interests of positivism and pragmatism. It is also a direct challenge to
Eurocentric colonialism:
But in the reaction of artists as diverse as Jarry, Rimbaud, Artaud,
Lawrence and Picasso, a more radical critique was formulated in which the
claims of European art to universal validity were questioned and in which
the claims of Europe to being a unique civilization were exposed as a
veneer on a deeper, ‘universal’ savagery. This view appears to have been
vindicated when the claims of nineteenth-century Europe to be civilized
collapsed in the horrors of the mass destruction of the First World War.
(Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies 130)

POSTMODERNITY
A similar terminological distinction ought to be performed in the
domain of “postmodernity”, a term we should reserve for the overall
paradigm of that which follows, opposes, or continues modernity. First, one
should talk of “the postmodern” as a radical ideology or episteme that
contests the totalizing and universalist pretensions of the Enlightenment and
chooses instead to focus on the particulars of various material contexts, on
oppositional drives of social experience and on a struggle for power.