|
May 1, 2005
In Australia it is difficult to rethink political divisions in terms of acceptance or rejection of modernity. There is some reluctance to regard modernity as simply another historically specific approach to reality, rather than as the necessary outcome of social/economic development. The modernist narrative is still seen to be alive and well as Western economies are deemed to be on an indefinite expansion as a result of the unprecedented growth in productivity precipitated by new technologies and guided by a technocratic administration.
Paul Piccone states this difficulty well:
"The problem is that the very posing the question in terms of "modernity" leads to an evaporation of discourse to a level of abstraction so general and inaccessible that the whole undertaking eventually ends up relegitimating the modernity under scrutiny by automatically translating familiar conceptual paradigms into common sense. Thus, today, the mere questioning of modernity is perceived to be either a reactionary vindication of pre-modernity or an expression of postmodern nihilism. Trapped in a unilinear temporal sequence, the modernist imagination confuses ideology with chronology, and interprets all transgressions of its dogmatically accepted norms as maladjustments or pathologies."
The recharged modernist discourse is one a Western triumphalism in which modernization and Westernization are conflated, the spread of market institutions and the globalization of Western civil society are confounded, and the 'final triumph' of 'democratic capitalism' is announced.
|
